| >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! |
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.