Inflammation could be the reason you’re depressed!
Naoise Mac Giollabhui, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham along with Richard Liu, PhD, got to work on this topic.
With Giollabhui as the lead author and Liu as the senior author, they published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry, titled "Effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity and anhedonia in depressed individuals with elevated inflammation: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials."
They investigated “whether anti-inflammatory medications are effective in reducing depressive symptom severity and anhedonia (decreased ability to feel pleasure) in a subset of depressed individuals with chronic, low-grade inflammation.”
Giollabhui and Lui insisted that the current anti-depressant treatments we have don’t work for many people and there is a need for more effective, new treatments, given that at any moment of time, more than 400 million individuals battle depression.
Over the last two decades, there has been increasing evidence that some depressed individuals have chronic, low-grade inflammation that might be triggering their symptoms.
This observation of a dysregulated immune system led to clinical trials in which depressed individuals were given a variety of anti-inflammatory treatments.
The results of these clinical trials, however, were mixed and it was hypothesized that results may have been mixed because these trials did not target the subset of depressed individuals exhibiting immune dysfunction – if there is no inflammation to begin with, anti-inflammatory medication won't be very helpful!
“So, our study was designed to determine whether anti-inflammatory medications are effective when given to depressed individuals who are actively exhibiting chronic, low-grade inflammation,” the two researchers mentioned.
Explaining their research, they stated, “We identified up to 11 randomized controlled trials in which anti-inflammatory medications were administered in up to 321 depressed individuals with elevated levels of inflammation.”
“We found that anti-inflammatory medications significantly reduced both depressive symptom severity and anhedonia at the study endpoint,” they concluded of depression triggered by inflammation.
