Depression - Caused by Inflammation, Thus Like Other Diseases of Civilization
It seems like you can earn an decent depression simply buy eating a lot of vegetable oils (Omega 6) and dropping fish oils (Omega 3). Deans keep on:
A post from Psycology today by Emily Deans, M.D. has the whole story. Here is a part:
...then you add a lot of grains or legumes with lectins and immunoreactive proteins, and top it off lots of modern chronic stress. Do this for a long period of time, and your body gets irritated - obesity, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune diseases are all related to inflammation. Turns out your brain can get pretty irritated too.Dean explains how inflammation are connected to depression, and which can be fueled buy bad eating habits. Very interesting.
A post from Psycology today by Emily Deans, M.D. has the whole story. Here is a part:
It is well known that symptoms of clinical depression are likely mediated by inflammation in the brain. A number of lines of evidence support this idea, including that depressed people, old and young, have elevated levels of certain inflammatory proteins in the plasma and cerebrospinal fluid. Anti-inflammatory agents treat depression, and pharmacologic agents such as interferon, that cause depression, also lead to increases in the inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-alpha. In addition, when someone who is depressed responds to an antidepressant treatment, these same inflammation markers decrease (1). People with generalized inflammatory syndromes (such as acute viral illness, rheumatoid arthritis, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular disease) have higher rates of depression than the general population too. I also notice in my clinic that people who have had bone surgery tend to get depressed for a few weeks after the operation, more so than people who had other kinds of surgery. I always wonder if sawing through the bones releases an enormous wave of inflammatory cytokines.There are several suspected mechanisms of how this inflammation leads to depression, many of them very intriguing. Here's one - the amino acid tryptophan is a precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin. Turns out that tryptophan is also the precursor to another, far less famous neurotransmitter, kynurenic. When the inflammatory cascade is activated, more tryptophan is made into kynurenic, which leaves less tryptophan around to make into serotonin. And everyone knows that without serotonin, we're unhappy (and angry). SSRIs work (when they do), it is thought, by undermining the effect of the inflammatory cytokines, pushing more tryptophan to be made into serotonin rather than kynurenic.
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