excerpt from article I posted

May 30, 2006

Here's a pertinent excerpt from the article. The point is that

depression is clearly not just a result of your sadness over the

disease. The disease itself is altering your mood, and the depression

is a symptom of it. The study shows that inflammation itself causes

depression, which explains why you find yourself crying over nothing

as your joints swell up. Because it's also logical to feel sad when

you're in pain it took a long time for people to study this; it's so

much easier to just dismiss it. But depression isn't just being sad

of course, it's the low energy, bleak, low feeling which is NOT the

same as just being sad. For me, my speech would slow down too. It

was definitely a big big change. That it happened when I was a

teenager made it very easy for doctors to dismiss as just my teenage

angst. But they were wrong. I'm normally pretty upbeat, speak fast,

think fast. I may get down, but the sluggish habits of mood I fell

into when I was in my teens had everything to do with RA. Not a

coincidence that that was when it was most active. Anyway:

***

The surprise results did fit in with some other vague hints that

depression and inflammation are entwined. Depressed people tend to

have slightly raised temperatures, which suggests that they are

suffering from some chronic inflammation. They are also three times as

likely to die of heart disease--often caused by arteriosclerosis,

itself an inflammatory condition of the linings of arteries.

Still, Maes's results languished in obscurity, being contradicted by

other studies almost as often as they were confirmed--until, that is,

Dantzer decided to take a second look at some old rat studies he had

done in the late 1980s.

When you inject rats with parts of bacterial cell walls called

lipopolysaccharides, their temperatures rise, their sleep patterns

change, they become less sociable and stop eating. And it isn't the

bits of bacteria that trigger this so-called " sickness behaviour " , but

the immune response to those bits. An injection of the cytokine

interleukin-1 (IL-1), which marauding macrophages produce when they

meet bacteria, makes the animals behave in exactly the same way. In

other words, the rat studies showed that inflammatory cytokines

directly influence behaviour

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