Watch out! Got inflammation? The it's aggressive meds for you!

[Skippa]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36459679

My concern here is that if you present with depression along with ME/CFS then any signs of inflammation in the blood test will have you "proven" to require agressive anti-depressants.

 

[TiredSam]

Way too easy to pick apart. I'm going for a lie down instead.

 

[A.B.]

The obvious explanation that these patients have an inflammatory disease that causes depressive symptoms as a side effect of inflammation is ignored.

No the conclusion is, let's treat them more aggressively with antidepressants instead of figuring out why they have inflammation.

Oh well at least there is some acknowledgement of a biological dimension. All considered this is probably good.

 

[Invisible Woman]

What a crock of....

 

[Hip]

Five years ago I had the same idea about the cause of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): that GAD may be due to brain inflammation in many cases.

I successful treated my own severe GAD using anti-inflammatory supplements. See these threads:

Non-Standard Anti-Anxiety Treatment

Completely eliminated my severe anxiety symptoms with three supplements!

These supplement might conceivably also work for those with neuroinflammation-driven depression. Certainly they helped reduce my anhedonia, which can be one of the facets of depression.

 

[chipmunk1]

it's not Inflammation. It's a small gremlin sitting in your head making a fire because it is cold and to remind you of your unresolved subconscious emotional conflicts.

 

[Hip]

The obvious explanation that these patients have an inflammatory disease that causes depressive symptoms as a side effect of inflammation is ignored.

No the conclusion is, let's treat them more aggressively with antidepressants instead of figuring out why they have inflammation.

Oh well at least there is some acknowledgement of a biological dimension. All considered this is probably good.

I don't think the inflammation is being ignored, because in the above article it mentions that:

Prof Pariante and his team are looking to test whether giving anti-inflammatory drugs alongside antidepressants might help.

Although anti-inflammatories may not be enough, because in this article Prof Carmine Pariante says:

inflammation could be responsible for the lack of new neurons and suggests that perhaps the particular [anti-inflammatory] drug that Godbout used didn’t have a broad enough effect to restart neurogenesis.

So Prof Pariante thinks that it may not just be the direct effects of brain inflammation alone that is causing depression, but also the fact that brain inflammation stops neurogenesis (the formation of new neurons).

As is well known, some new theories on the cause of depression point to a lack of neurogenesis.



There are also other researchers looking at the origin of the brain inflammation behind depression:
So depression is an inflammatory disease, but where does the inflammation come from?

But it may be easier said than done to address the origin of inflammation, if that origin is a chronic infection. In my own case, the suspected enterovirus that triggered my ME/CFS also triggered significant anxiety, and I believe the mechanism was likely through the virus ramping up brain inflammation (and thus glutamate secretion from activated microglia).

However, as we all know, with current medical technology and present-day antivirals, it's not that easy to combat a chronic infection.

 

[wastwater]

The inflammation may come from the way you handle normal average everyday viruses/bacteria ect ,even in latency governed by youre genes,I think its a step in the right direction.

 

[ebethc]

There are also other researchers looking at the origin of the brain inflammation behind depression:
So depression is an inflammatory disease, but where does the inflammation come from?

But it may be easier said than done to address the origin of inflammation, if that origin is a chronic infection. In my own case, the suspected enterovirus that triggered my ME/CFS also triggered significant anxiety, and I believe the mechanism was likely through the virus ramping up brain inflammation (and thus glutamate secretion from activated microglia).

However, as we all know, with current medical technology and present-day antivirals, it's not that easy to combat a chronic infection.

agree with all your comments, @Hip ...

ps More and more, I think most shrinks are quacks...Love this scathing letter sent by the then-director of NIMH to APA around the time the updated DSM was released.... He refers to it as a "dictionary" of "labels" whose "weakness is it's lack of validity" due to lack of laboratory measures and over-reliance on symptoms. Snap!
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml

 

[Hip]

@ebethc

I don't myself see the diagnostic labels created by psychiatry as quackery; I think they are apt and useful (with the exception of somatoform illnesses, which I do think are extremely dubious).

The issue with psychiatry is where it looks to find causes of mental symptoms and mental illnesses: psychiatry tends to look for psychological or psychosocial causes for these symptoms; but I think it will turn out that most mental symptoms and mental illnesses are primarily caused by abnormalities in the brain, such as neuroinflammation.

That is why I was pleased to see this new research, which has developed a test for the neuroinflammation that can cause depression. This is definitely psychiatry moving in the right direction: looking for abnormalities in the brain to explain mental symptoms.

 

[duncan]

That is why I was pleased to see this new research, which has developed a test for the neuroinflammation that can cause depression. This is definitely psychiatry moving in the right direction: looking for abnormalities in the brain to explain mental symptoms.

The reality is they slyly, and with veiled wording, promote the fantasy that mental symptoms explain abnormalities in the brain.

 

[Woolie]

what a joke!

He suspects the inflammation is the body's response to stress, but, paradoxically, it gets in the way of drug treatment.

High levels of inflammation can interfere with the same biological processes that are crucial for antidepressants to work.

How about: "antidepressants don't work on these people because what they have isn't really depression. Our way of defining depression is so crap, all these other things end up getting slapped with the same label"

(Notice too the slide in the use of "stress' here. Inflammation is the body's response to physical stress, but let's not be bothered with those silly distinctions between physical and psychological. That's so dualist!. These patients are obviously psychologically stressed).

Used to be called "treatment resistant depression". Responds well to prednisone, which is not surprising.

Is it good they've found a marker? Maybe, but there's still a psychobabble explanations for the inflammatory markers too. Now there are models out there claiming that depressed brains actually produce cytokines.

 

[ebethc]

@ebethc

I don't myself see the diagnostic labels created by psychiatry as quackery; I think they are apt and useful (with the exception of somatoform illnesses, which I do think are extremely dubious).

The issue with psychiatry is where it looks to find causes of mental symptoms and mental illnesses: psychiatry tends to look for psychological or psychosocial causes for these symptoms; but I think it will turn out that most mental symptoms and mental illnesses are primarily caused by abnormalities in the brain, such as neuroinflammation.

That is why I was pleased to see this new research, which has developed a test for the neuroinflammation that can cause depression. This is definitely psychiatry moving in the right direction: looking for abnormalities in the brain to explain mental symptoms.

@Hip - agreed.... by "quack" I mean that many often can't make that distinction, which is an important one...

 

[Hip]

I had not come across this idea that stress can cause inflammation, but there seems to be some studies on this:

Chronic stress, glucocorticoid receptor resistance, inflammation, and disease risk
This paper proposes that chronic stress results in glucocorticoid receptor resistance (GCR) that then leads to a failure to down-regulate inflammatory response.

 

[Dichotohmy]

Neuroinflammation has been a known correlate to psychiatric diseases for a long time, but the evidence never seems to gain traction or lead to effective pharmaceutical treatment for neuroinflammation. It could be because medicine isn't very good at treating neuro-immune diseases. However, in the case of life threatening neiro-immune conditions like anti-NMDAR encephalitis, medicine will treat aggressively with immune suppressants and other full measures.

I think the real reason psychiatric problems, which are likely of a neuro-immune, and thus neuroinflammatory origin, are treated with half measures like anti-depressants, atypical antipsychotics, or behavioral therapies comes down to money plain and simple. The perfect combination of managed healthcare, robber-baron-like pharmaceutical companies, and doctors pressured to see more patients in less time, and finally, the unlikelyhood of imminent death are some of the reasons why psychiatric patients get destined to half measure treatments.

A perfect example of this idea is the diagnosis of treatment resistant depression. TRD is by credible accounts a neuroinflammatory condition, and thus deserves the real full measure treatments like this article suggests, yet so many TRD patients continue trying over 25 drug combos and other half measures. The fact that TRD is a real diagnosis that sticks, instead of the patient's health-care team seeking a new diagnosis when its obvious depression treatments aren't working, cynically demonstrates the pervasiveness of half measures in medicine and a lacking in a sense of urgency among individual physicians.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/maj...ent-resistance-major-depression-perfect-storm

 

[knackers323]

what are the kinds of mads and supps that can be used to try and treat this inflammation?

 

[Skippa]

Well this thread has turned up some v interesting points indeed.

Firstly, @Hip I'm going to be trying your anti-anxiety trio in a couple of weeks.

Stress does seem to crop up time and time again, I just think there's a whole heap of chicken and egg here...

Finally, I hope that depression + inflammation doesn't == let's increase your SSRI's to the maximum dose, as is so often the case, the panaceaic answer to everything...

 

[me/cfs 27931]

A perfect example of this idea is the diagnosis of treatment resistant depression. TRD is by credible accounts a neuroinflammatory condition, and thus deserves the real full measure treatments like this article suggests, yet so many TRD patients continue trying over 25 drug combos and other half measures. The fact that TRD is a real diagnosis that sticks, instead of the patient's health-care team seeking a new diagnosis when its obvious depression treatments aren't working, cynically demonstrates the pervasiveness of half measures in medicine and a lacking in a sense of urgency among individual physicians.

These TRD diagnosed patients eventually find themselves abandoned by psychiatry, because none of the psychiatric treatments work. Medical doctors won't try to help them either, because they are diagnosed psych patients.

A TRD diagnosis means long term abandonment by the medical system with no treatment. It's appalling.

 

[adreno]

Finding clear signs of inflammation in the brain should be enough to cause a paradigm shift here - why are they still calling it a mental disorder?

Oh yes that's right, negative thoughts and bad coping skills causes stress, which leads to inflammation in the brain. Now you need a lot of CBT and mindfulness to make you cope with everyday life.

 

[chipmunk1]

Finding clear signs of inflammation in the brain should be enough to cause a paradigm shift here - why are they still calling it a mental disorder?

Mindfulness therapists need a job too.

The average psychiatrist spends 5 minutes with a patient. Most of what they do is write scripts and a large part of these are for SSRIs. I don't think they have time to practice real medicine.

Oh yes that's right, negative thoughts and bad coping skills causes stress, which leads to inflammation in the brain.

How does psychological stress cause inflammation? Cortisol is an antiinflammatory hormone?