ArticlePharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland)2024
Putative Pharmacological Depression and Anxiety-Related Targets of Calcitriol Explored by Network Pharmacology and Molecular Docking.
Article in Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neurobiological Mechanisms of Vitamin D in Anxiety: Evidence from Rodent Models and Bioinformatics-Based Target Identification.Nutrients · 2026Review
- Luteolin alleviates angiogenesis in HUVECs by inhibiting VEGFA expression: integrating network pharmacology and experimental validation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D3 Status in Adolescents With Anxiety Disorders: A Case-Control and Vitamin D Supplementation Substudy.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Depression and anxiety disorders, prevalent neuropsychiatric conditions that frequently coexist, limit psychosocial functioning and, consequently, the individual's quality of life. Since the pharmacological treatment of these disorders has several limitations, the search for effective and secure antidepressant and anxiolytic compounds is welcome. Vitamin D has been shown to exhibit neuroprotective, antidepressant, and anxiolytic properties. Therefore, this study aimed to explore new molecular targets of calcitriol, the active form of vitamin D, through integrated bioinformatic analysis. Calcitriol targets were predicted in SwissTargetPrediction server (2019 version). The disease targets were collected by the GeneCards database searching the keywords "depression" and "anxiety". Gene ontology (GO) and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) were used to analyze the intersections of targets. Network analyses were carried out using GeneMania server (2023 version) and Cytoscape (V. 3.9.1.) software. Molecular docking predicted the main targets of the network and Ligplot predicted the main intermolecular interactions. Our study showed that calcitriol may interact with multiple targets. The main targets found are the vitamin D receptor (VDR), histamine H3 receptor (H3R), endocannabinoid receptors 1 and 2 (CB1 and CB2), nuclear receptor NR1H3, patched-1 (PTCH1) protein, opioid receptor NOP, and phosphodiesterase enzymes PDE3A and PDE5A. Considering the role of these targets in the pathophysiology of depression and anxiety, our findings suggest novel putative mechanisms of action of vitamin D as well as new promising molecular targets whose role in these disorders deserves further investigation.
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