Inflammation may be a common mechanism that influences both our physical and mental health
- Peter Jones
The study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, indicates that mental illness and chronic physical illness such as coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes may share common biological mechanisms.
When we are exposed to an infection, for example influenza or a stomach bug, our immune system fights back to control and remove the infection. During this process, immune cells flood the blood stream with proteins such as interleukin-6 (IL-6), a tell-tale marker of infection. However, even when we are healthy, our bodies carry trace levels of these proteins – known as ‘inflammatory markers’ – which rise exponentially in response to infection.
Now, researchers have carried out the first ever longitudinal study – a study that follows the same cohort of people over a long period of time – to examine the link between these markers in childhood and subsequent mental illness.
A team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge studied a sample of 4,500 individuals from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children – also known as Children of the 90s – taking blood samples at age 9 and following up at age 18 to see if they had experienced episodes of depression or psychosis. The team divided the individuals into three groups, depending on whether their everyday levels of IL-6 were low, medium or high. They found that those children in the ‘high’ group were nearly two times more likely to have experienced depression or psychosis than those in the ‘low’ group.
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Image: Burnt out
Credit: Stu
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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