Depression: a breakthrough in understanding the nature of the disease and its treatment?

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The essence of it is that some of us are betrayed by our most important defender - the immune system that changes our attitude.This disease affects 350 million people around the world, among them - living in the English county of Cambridgeshire Hailey Mason.

"My depression leads me to the point that I can not get out of bed, I can not leave the bedroom, I can not go into the living room and talk to my husband and his children," Hayley says. "I can not have a TV all the time I'm irritated by sounds and light, suicidal thoughts are following me, I'm engaged in self-mutilation, I can not get out of the house, I do not drive a car, so I'm sitting all the time in four walls, because I can not cope with the reality surrounding me. "

Antidepressants and psychological help, such as is cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, many people with depression help, but there are those who do not respond to such treatments.

So now scientists decided to approach this problem from the other side: to see if the immune system can cause depression?

"In my opinion, we need to think radically," said Professor Ed Ballmore, head of the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge University and heading a new direction for studying depression.

"Recent history shows us that if we want to make a breakthrough in treatment in some area that remains extremely important in terms of causing disability and suffering, then we need to take a new path," says the professor.

Therefore, now doctors are studying whether the debilitated immune system causes inflammation in the body, which leads to a change in mood.

As Professor Bullmore points out, this in a sense refers to each of us - it's only necessary to remember the last time we had a flu or cold.

"Depression treatment and inflammation often go hand in hand." If you have the flu, the immune system responds to it, you have inflammation, and very often people's mood also changes. "Their behavior changes, they can become less sociable, more sleepy, withdrawn "They may have negative thoughts that are characteristic of depression, and all of this is a consequence of the infection," says Professor Ballmore.

This is a delicate approach, which at the same time contains a very significant shift in understanding the nature of this disease. It's not that we begin to feel sorry for ourselves when we are sick, but that the chemicals that cause inflammation directly affect our mood.

Inflammation is part of the response of our immune system to danger. This is an incredibly complex process that prepares our body for fighting hostile forces.

If the inflammation is insignificant, then the infection can be discouraged. If the inflammation is large, then it causes harm, and for some reason a third of all people with depression show a constantly high level of inflammatory processes in the body. In particular, Hayley: "I have a constantly high level of markers of inflammatory diseases, in my opinion, the normal level is up to 0.7, and I have 40, and this is constantly found in my blood test."

There is increasing evidence that inflammatory processes are not just something that is sometimes found in patients with depression, this is what causes depression; In other words - that the immune system changes the work of the brain.

"Pull yourself together"?

Depression is a disease that affects hundreds of millions of people, and if anti-inflammatory drugs can help a certain percentage of them, even small, it will be significant figures.

And if immunotherapy proves its worth in this matter, the most important consequence will be that this will change our perception of this ailment: we are unlikely to think of those suffering from depression that they "just need to pull themselves together."

"I hate when people say that, because if I could, I would," says Jennifer, "just like if a person has diabetes and his insulin levels are high, and you say: "Oh, come on, stop bugging you."

Haley replies: "If we could prove that depression is a physical problem, then it would change a lot, then people would stop treating depression as something far-fetched, which happens in the head. A category of real diseases, and people will believe. "

Professor Pariante concludes this thought as follows: "This is a breakthrough, because for the first time we show that depression is not only a mental disorder, in fact it is not even a brain disorder, it is a disorder of the whole organism."