[david_l_lin]

>Why isn’t this fact used clinically, at least for diagnosis, then?

1. Primarily because IL6 and IFNg are inflammatory cytokines that when increased can indicate any number of things, most commonly caused by infection tissue damage, or other chronic inflammatory diseases like IBD. These cytokines are not unique to depression.

2. Clinical definitions of depression are not related to or dependent on inflammation. AFAIK diagnostic measures of depression are only related to mood.

3. Medicine is notoriously slow at leveraging scientific findings. We’ve known for decades about the power of early cancer detection by cfDNA sequencing yet we still rely on symptoms to catch cancer, when it’s often too late. My jaded opinion is that fee for service is not compatible with disease prevention.

[guerrilla]

> 1. Primarily because IL6 and IFNg are inflammatory cytokines that when increased can indicate any number of things, most commonly caused by infection tissue damage, or other chronic inflammatory diseases like IBD. These cytokines are not unique to depression.

Yeah but if you already had been diagnosed with depression, it seems like they'd want to check this.

[ellopoppit]

"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests"

-Allen Frances

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances

[david_l_lin]

Not really, we don't do tests if it won't impact treatment, and in this case there is no change in treatment (yet) based on inflammatory cytokines.