Helping News November, 2012 Issue 52
DEPRESSION: AN ALLERGIC REACTION TO STRESS?
According to LiveScience, new research using mice indicates how an over-active immune system responding to stress may lead to depression. Researchers used a form of social defeat stress, whereby stress was produced essentially by a “larger, meaner and older male mouse” bullying a younger mouse over a 10-day period. “Mice whose immune systems responded to stress by overproducing an inflammatory compound called Interleukin-6 (IL-6) were more likely to become the mousy versions of depressed than mice with non-overactive immune systems.” Interleukin-6 is found at higher levels in people struggling with depression. Georgia Hodes, one of the study’s researchers at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, explains the findings this way: for some people stress is an allergic reaction leading to depression, similar to how an allergen (pet dander, mold, etc.) can cause an over-reactive immune system to produce a runny nose. Furthermore, symptoms of depression (i.e., lethargy, poor appetite) are similar to how the body reacts to physical illness.
When mice that had produced a sharp increase in IL-6 in response to the stressor were given a drug to block the effects of IL-6, their behavior shifted and was comparable to that of their non-susceptible stress counterparts. Hodes reported that some of these drugs are currently being used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and could be tested to treat depression in humans.
*Additional research also suggests that productive communication patterns may help mitigate the adverse effects of relationship conflict on inflammatory dysregulation (elevated IL-6) in human beings, giving rise to the notion that cognition and behavior play a role in the immune system as well.
More information coming...
