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by guerrilla 1481 days ago
> 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.

2 comments

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

-Allen Frances

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

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.