Clinical depression associated with a 30% increase of inflammation in the brain, according to a new study. Medical News Today reports that increasingly, evidence is suggesting that inflammation may drive some depressive symptoms such as low mood, loss of appetite and reduced ability to sleep. What the new study set out to investigate was whether inflammation is a driver of clinical depression independent of other physical illness.
Researchers from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health's Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, used positron emission tomography (PET) to scan the brains of 20 patients with depression and 20 healthy control participants in particular, the team closely measured the activation of microglia – immune cells that play a key role in the brain's inflammatory response
The PET scans showed significant inflammation in the brains of the people with depression, and the inflammation was most severe among the participants with the most severe depression. The brains of people who were experiencing clinical depression exhibited an inflammatory increase of 30%.
Previous studies have examined markers of inflammation in the blood of depressed people, in an attempt to solve the "chicken or egg" debate of whether inflammation is a consequence of or contributor to major depression.
"This finding provides the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammation during a major depressive episode," says senior author Dr Jeffrey Meyer, who holds a Canada Research chair in the neurochemistry of major depression. Meyer suggests that future studies should investigate the possible impact of anti-inflammatory drugs on depression symptoms. "Depression is a complex illness and we know that it takes more than one biological change to tip someone into an episode," says Meyer. "But we now believe that inflammation in the brain is one of these changes and that's an important step forward."
[link url="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/288715.php"]Full Medical News Today report[/link]
[link url="http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2091919"]JAMA Psychiatry abstract[/link]