03 Linking Depression and Inflammation

SUFFERING FROM a chronic illness can obviously alter your mental health. Not surprisingly, depression affects over 40 percent of cancer and rheumatoid arthritis patients, and nearly 30 percent of those with diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But there is another factor that these and other severe diseases have in common: inflammation. Scientists now believe that in many cases, inflammation may exacerbate mental health conditions. Their work is leading to new medications and insights for treatment. “All along the pathway of that clinical course of depression, inflammation seems to play at least some sort of role,” says Marx of Deakin University. For a long time, researchers considered depression to be a simple story of neurotransmitters gone wrong, Marx says. Serotonin and dopamine are two particularly important neurotransmitters, messenger…