So depression is an inflammatory disease, but where does the inflammation come from?

By Michael Berk, L. Williams, F. Jacka, Adrienne O’Neil, J. Pasco, S. Moylan, Nicholas B. Allen, A. Stuart, A. Hayley, M. Byrne and 1 more. BMC Medicine, 2013

1,280 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundWe now know that depression is associated with a chronic, low-grade inflammatory response and activation of cell-mediated immunity, as well as activation of the compensatory anti-inflammatory reflex system. It is similarly accompanied by increased oxidative and nitrosative stress (O&NS), which contribute to neuroprogression in the disorder. The obvious question this poses is ‘what is the source of this chronic low-grade inflammation?’DiscussionThis review explores the role of inflammation and oxidative and nitrosative stress as possible mediators of known environmental risk factors in depression, and discusses potential implications of these findings. A range of factors appear to increase the risk for the development of depression, and seem to be associated with systemic inflammation; these include psychosocial stressors, poor diet, physical inactivity, obesity, smoking, altered gut permeability, atopy, dental cares, sleep and vitamin D deficiency.SummaryThe identification of known sources of inflammation provides support for inflammation as a mediating pathway to both risk and neuroprogression in depression. Critically, most of these factors are plastic, and potentially amenable to therapeutic and preventative interventions. Most, but not all, of the above mentioned sources of inflammation may play a role in other psychiatric disorders, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Biological Psychiatry, Pharmacology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f2ae5c879aee83935f71ad50c41e062abd9f0d2a

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Citations in the corpus

A randomised controlled trial of dietary improvement for adults with major depression (the ‘SMILES’ trial) (2017, background): “Several cohort studies also reported associations between the quality of women’s diets during pregnancy and the risk for emotional dysregulation in children [13–15], with new insights into potential mechanisms of action that include brain plasticity [16], the gut microbiota [17] and inflammatory [18”
Peripheral cytokine and chemokine alterations in depression: a meta‐analysis of 82 studies (2017, background): “, poor diet) could be relevant sources of immune activation in MDD (57).”
Rethinking IL-6 and CRP: Why they are more than inflammatory biomarkers, and why it matters. (2018, positive): “They may be implicated in mental disorders, such as depression and schizophrenia (e.g., Berk et al., 2013; Fernandes et al., 2015; Miller & Raison, 2016).”