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The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think - Quanta Magazine

The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think - Quanta Magazine

The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think - Quanta Magazine
Jan 26, 2023 1 min, 10 secs

“If you were still of the opinion that it was simply a chemical imbalance of serotonin, then yeah, it’s pretty damning,” said Taylor Braund, a clinical neuroscientist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Black Dog Institute in Australia who was not involved in the new study.

They discovered that the drugs blocked the animals’ body from absorbing compounds called amines — which include serotonin, a chemical that carries messages between nerve cells in the brain.

In a recent conference presentation, a team led by Jonathan Repple, a psychiatry researcher at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, described how they scanned the brains of acutely depressed volunteers and found that they differed structurally from those of a non-depressed control group.

When psychiatrists have evaluated populations of patients who have chronic inflammatory diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, they’ve found that “all of them have higher-than-average rates of depression,” said Charles Nemeroff, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Texas, Austin.

Interferon alpha, which is sometimes used to treat chronic hepatitis C and other conditions, causes a major inflammatory response throughout the body by flooding the immune system with proteins known as cytokines — molecules that facilitate reactions ranging from mild swelling to septic shock.

Increasingly, some scientists are pushing to reframe “depression” as an umbrella term for a suite of related conditions, much as oncologists now think of “cancer” as referring to a legion of distinct but similar malignancies.

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