Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notabee 2401 days ago
Depression has plenty of evidence linking it to inflammation. If we can start seeing it not in terms of mind/body dualism, or on some outmoded moral spectrum, but on the same terms as any other illness, like the common cold, we'll make a lot of progress with it as a society. Much like the common cold, it probably has many different causes (like colds are causes by many viruses) but the same disease phenotype.

What you might be getting at with the comment that "everyone has it" is that modern society seems to cause depression just as surely as swimming in sewage will cause other illnesses. Much like society prior to germ theory, widespread depression will continue until we can learn more about the causes and mechanisms. People used to think other illnesses were moral failing or spiritual possession until we discovered that it was from drinking water that someone else crapped in. So how many things are crapping on your mental health? Are they really inevitable and necessary, or just bad cultural programming and assumptions about what society should look like? How much might be from strictly physical causes like air pollution? (There's research backing that.)

2 comments

Wow, aptly put, reading that made me smile :)

    Depression has plenty of evidence
    linking it to inflammation
That would be interesting. What makes you think so? Any studies you can link to?
Here's a few for depression and air pollution[1][2] Here's some studies on anti-inflammatory treatments for treatment resistant depression[3] And more relevant to the original topic, 5HT-2A receptor agonists may have anti-inflammatory effects. There's huge potential in a broad class of molecules that have been banned for moral, not medicinal, reasons.[4] Edit: picked another one [5]

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30719959

2. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/brain-pollution-evid...

3.https://www.healio.com/psychiatry/depression/news/online/%7B...

4.https://www.fasebj.org/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supp...

5.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788795/

That's just some quick googling. There's tons more out there to read!

Sorry, but none of these are studies about the relationship between depression and inflammation treatment.

Such a study would have to provide a measurement of the severity of the depression. Then split the patients in two groups. Give one group a placebo and the other one the inflammation treatment. And then compare the depression severity in those groups after the treatment.

Somewhat dated now, but this is a good review from 2006.

Cytokines sing the blues: inflammation and the pathogenesis of depression

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147149060...

Hmm.. that seems like a journalistic article that one would have to pay $41.95 for to read it?

I would be more interested in a study. With clearly outlined methology.

It's a medical journal, Trends in Immunology, the same type of journal that all medical studies are published in. Unfortunately we still have a broken publishing system in the US so it is insanely expensive to read articles/studies published in these journals unless you work somewhere with an institution-level account.