Depression: A revolution in treatment?
It's not very often we get to talk about a revolution in understanding and treating depression and yet now doctors are talking about "one of the strongest discoveries in psychiatry for the last 20 years".
It is based around the idea that some people are being betrayed by their fiercest protector. That their immune system is altering their brain.
Anti-depressant drugs and psychological treatments, like cognitive behavioural therapy, help the majority of people. But many don't respond to existing therapies and so some scientists are now exploring a new frontier - whether the immune system could be causing depression.
The focus is on an errant immune system causing inflammation in the body and altering mood.
And Prof Bullmore argues that's something we can all relate to, if we just think back to the last time we had a cold or flu.
He said: "Depression and inflammation often go hand in hand, if you have flu, the immune system reacts to that, you become inflamed and very often people find that their mood changes too. "Their behaviour changes, they may become less sociable, more sleepy, more withdrawn. They may begin to have some of the negative ways of thinking that are characteristic of depression and all of that follows an infection."
It is a subtle and yet significant shift in thinking. The argument is we don't just feel sorry for ourselves when we are sick, but that the chemicals involved in inflammation are directly affecting our mood.
Inflammation is part of the immune system's response to danger. It is a hugely complicated process to prepare our body to fight off hostile forces. If inflammation is too low then an infection can get out of hand. If it is too high, it causes damage.
And for some reason, about one-third of depressed patients have consistently high levels of inflammation. Hayley is one of them: "I do have raised inflammation markers, I think normal is under 0.7 and mine is 40, it's coming up regularly in blood tests."
There is now a patchwork quilt of evidence suggesting inflammation is more than something you simply find in some depressed patients, but is actually the cause of their disease. That the immune system can alter the workings of the brain.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-37166293
