[FedorinoGore]

I think it's not only depression but also general "discomfort" that comes often with increased inflammation. You feel bad - you turn to people around you for support/distraction. So it would be interesting to see "if people seek communication" online and offline. Offline would be harder to quantify though

would also add this research direction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24331897/

[cpncrunch]

Mental stress releases CRP, so I suspect inflammation isn't causing anything here, just a marker.

[InSteady]

>Mental stress releases CRP

The body is full of these chicken-egg relationships. It really is a gigantic and bewildering system of positive and negative feedback loops (in terms of effect, not value judgements). Mental stress is one trigger, sure, but if you accept my interpretations below it is not much of a leap to see that CRP can also lead to significant increases in mental stress.

I think it would be more accurate to say inflammation isn't the primary underlying cause but is rather an adaptive response gone awry. However, once triggered, inflammation (and it's downstream effects) can have a significant influence on one's subjective experience and behavior, by way of physiological alterations to brain chemistry and function.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/

>Increased inflammation is seen in the periphery in both depression and fatigue. This inflammation leads to increased permeability of the BBB,* allowing for easier entry of inflammatory molecules or immune cells into the CNS.

If you happen to have a disruption/disorder of your microbiome that includes loosening of the tight junctions of your epithelium (aka intestinal permeability aka "leaky gut"), that means that cytotoxic byproducts of bacterial metabolism and your body's immune responses to their presence (eg Mast cell release of histamine, heparin, cytokines, chemokines, etc) can enter your bloodstream and then cross your BBB to get into your brain.

I believe that inflammation plays a role in each of these three steps: loosening of the tight junctions in epithelium, release of chemical mediators by mast cells (eg in response to detection of cytokines, rather than strictly in the presence of allergens and toxins), and increasing the permeability of the blood brain barrier.

The chemokines are particularly concerning:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11786310/

>Chemokines in the brain have been recognised as essential elements in neurodegenerative diseases and related neuroinflammation.

Fun times!

[strogonoff]

It’s reasonable to say that the causal relationship between the mind and the body (if we treat them as distinct at all!) is fundamentally undetermined, and attacking inflammation issues from both mental and physiological wellbeing angles is worthwhile.

For example, it may be possible to say that inflammation correlates with mental stress, but given lifestyle choices made under mental stress (such as your diet and so on) are also what causes or at least contributes to that inflammation it’s dubious whether we can completely untangle the two and definitively prove that the causal arrow does not, in fact, point in the counter-intuitive (from physicalist perspective) direction.

[hgsgm]

Or is it a proxy?

Suppose X causes inflammation and social media use.

Suppose you want to reduce social media use.

You look at this study and think I should reduce inflammation, so I can reduce social media use? How do I do that? By removing causes of inflammation.

The thing to be careful about is to avoid jumping to some medication or surgery that directly removes inflammation, and be sure to eliminate something that causes inflammation.

[cpncrunch]

I think we just need to ask: what are the most common causes of this type of inflammation? Probably depression, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. So, the options are:

- inactive people use social media more, and the inactivity causes inflammation due to heart disease / diabetes - depression causes inflammation, and depressed people use social media more - social media causes depression, which causes inflammation

[b800h]

Inflammation can be rather subtle. Someone ostensibly unaffected could have a load of biomarkers of inflammation, and it's associated with all sorts of odd and bad stuff. This is a strange study, perhaps the press release is just dodgy and the paper is easier to understand.

[gcr]

is there any research linking this with alcoholism / smoking / other shortsighted comforts?