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Depression helps immunity fight infections
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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Depression could arise as an aid to the immune system: during illness, it changes our behavior so that immunity is easier to cope with the infection. Cold helps bed rest and ... depression! Cold helps bed rest and ... Depression!
According to statistics, about every tenth adult US resident suffers from depression. It is certainly not very pleasant, but its wide distribution causes scientists to think more and more often that depression can have its pluses. Otherwise, it would not be so firmly "sewn" into our brain.
In an article published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, its authors, two American psychiatrists, suggest that in evolution, depression and an immune response to infection went hand in hand.
About the relationship between depression and the inflammatory immune response, researchers say several decades. It is known, for example, that those who suffer from depression have more "irritable" immunity, they may have an inflammation focus even in the absence of infection. On the other hand, a high level of molecular markers of inflammation is not necessarily a consequence of depression. In his article, Andrew Miller of Emory University and Charles Reyzon of the University of Arizona write that mutations that cause a propensity for depression often affect not only the psychoneurological state, but also immunity. The authors suggest a rather bold conclusion that depression could arise as a by-product of the evolutionary debugging of the immune system, but it was unexpectedly useful in fighting immunity with infections.
Depression changes our behavior: we avoid society, lose appetite, fall into apathy, feel constant fatigue. And this is very useful during the illness: first, so all resources are spent only on the immune response, and not on extraneous activity, and secondly, we less disperse the infection around ourselves and less get new portions of the pathogen. In those times when there were no effective medications yet, depression could well save a person from death in case of an infectious disease - thanks to the correction of the patient's behavior. This theory also explains why stress is one of the main causes of depression. Stress accompanies the conflict situation, which could easily turn into a fight among human ancestors. A fight is an inevitable wound, and a wound is an infection. So, it turns out, the stress in advance prepares the body for the fact that he will soon have to spend his immunity and severely curtail the activity.
And even sleep disorders, which are observed both in depression and in an intense inflammatory response, also fit well into the theory under consideration: during a disease, a predator can easily overtake a patient, so it is important to detect it first. And in order to find it in time, you need to stay awake.
This hypothesis, of course, requires verification, but if it is confirmed, then, probably, depression and autoimmune diseases can be treated with the same drugs.
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