Inflammation: From Depression to Dementia Inflammation is the New Frontier

Another “welcome to my world” article about how inflammation is related to mental conditions from depression to dementia.  “The barrier between mind and body, for so long a dogmatic conviction, appears to be crumbling.” Of course, that is the relationship between mind and body has been a pillar of Chinese Medicine for Millennia.  My own interest and research into this relationship is through the autonomic nervous system and measuring heart rate variability.  Inflammation can cause increased sympathetic tone, and increased sympathetic tone can lead to inflammation. Lower stress and you lower inflammation. If you do that with acupuncture it is safe and elegant and you reap lots of benefits.

Even more pervasively, low-grade inflammation, detectable only by blood tests, is increasingly considered to be part of the reason why common life experiences such as poverty, stress, obesity or ageing are bad for public health.

The reasonably well-informed hope – and I emphasize those words at this stage – is that targeting brain inflammation could lead to breakthroughs in prevention and treatment of depression, dementia and psychosis on a par with the proven impact of immunological medicines for arthritis, cancer and MS. Indeed, a drug originally licensed for multiple sclerosis is already being tried as a possible immune treatment for schizophrenia…

These results confirmed that bodily inflammation can cause changes in how the brain works…

An alternative example might be ketamine, a form of which has just been licensed in the UK for treatment of depression. It works by blocking a receptor for glutamate in the brain but it doesn’t work equally well for everyone. We know that inflammation can increase the amount of glutamate in the brain, so it’s predictable that more inflamed patients might be more responsive to the glutamate-blocking effects of ketamine…

Currently, physical and mental health services are sharply segregated, reflecting a philosophical prejudice against viewing the mind and body as deeply intertwined. The links that many patients recognise in their own experience of illness tend to be somewhat discounted by the standard NHS provision of mental or physical healthcare services. In contrast, the new science of inflammation and the brain is clearly aligned with arguments for breaking down these barriers in clinical practice. More than that, though, it has the potential to transform our thinking about illness more broadly. The barrier between mind and body, for so long a dogmatic conviction, appears to be crumbling.