Reconceptualizing major depressive disorder as an infectious disease

http://www.biolmoodanxietydisord.com/content/4/1/10

by winstonsmith • 12 years ago

30 12 12 years ago

aw3c22• 12 years ago

The domain looks so super trashy and spammy, is this an actual trustworthy journal?

Submitter here. I ended up at that journal by following a link in this opinion blog at The New York Times: http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/what-if-were-wro... The author, Anna North, thinks it's legit. Also, it's linked to here by the NIH: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1820/

aw3c22• 12 years ago

Thank you!

Osmium2• 12 years ago

"Biol. Mood Anxiety Disord." is probably the ISO 4[1] abbreviation of the journal, hence the domain.

For instance, when citing a paper from the European Physical Journal, the ISO 4 standard prescribes the abbreviation "Eur. Phys. J.". Note that ISO 4 is particularly efficient for abbreviating journal titles, as the word journal for example is abbreviated to simply "J.".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4

mabbo• 12 years ago

When we look back at the history of many illnesses, it's easy to wonder how the previous generations could have been so dumb to not have realized the root causes. The story of stomach ulcers is especially wonderful, because it's so recent [1] (stomach ulcers were obviously caused by stress, and poor diet, etc).

One wonders how many obvious root causes to common illnesses are sitting right in front of us. A good friend of mine has dealt with depression issues for many years. I'd love to learn that a quick anti-parasite treatment would relieve her of the pain she's dealt with.

[1] http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/07-dr-drank-broth-gave-...

Osmium2• 12 years ago

One wonders how many obvious root causes to common illnesses are sitting right in front of us.

Perhaps it's a silly comparison, but I was reminded when reading this of the Facebook bug the other day[1] where progress was suddenly made when they started to think of system components as malicious actors communicating over covert channels. Here is someone arguing that we should be thinking about depression in essentially the same way: there are malicious actors (infectious agents) communicating over a covert channel (by some mechanism we don't yet understand).

Perhaps the analogy is a bit of a stretch, but I think the idea of re-conceptualising a known problem in a new light is probably a good one.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8660994

bayesianhorse• 12 years ago

Well, no. If there had been obvious causes for major depression, they would have been found by now. There may be some infectious agents who induce depressions (like hepatitis), and some have not yet been discovered, but I highly doubt that a major infectious cause for major depression is still "hiding".

EdwardCoffin• 12 years ago

Did you miss the comparison to ulcers and how long their real cause was overlooked in favour of a mistaken cause?

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

What has bothered me about medical practice -- at least and especially mainstream medical practice in the U.S. -- is that there is so much professionally declared "It can't be. That doesn't exist. Etc." until the evidence becomes overwhelming to the contrary.

That is, that absence of evidence is taken for and prescriptively treated as absolute evidence of absence.

"Cancer is not contagious." Well, as I seem to recall from recent comments of an expert in the field, we are now looking at upwards of 30% of types of cancer being tied to an infectious agent.

Not yet having read the OP link, I already recall that researchers are now, per popular/mainstream reporting, looking at, among other things, the human biome (symbiotic organisms such as microflora) as likely playing a significant role in health including mental health.

First, it was "all in your head". Then, it was "your genetics" -- and new classes of pills.

Now, finally, some acknowledgement that if your environment sucks, lo and behold, this may physically, and not just "psychically", affect your well being.

In summary, treat the patient, not the prescribed domain of a medical profession whose institutions have more than a bit of sometimes blindered self-interest.

jrapdx3• 12 years ago

Certainly a reasonable hypothesis in light of the growing body of evidence that inflammatory factors are implicated in MDD and other psychiatric disorders.

Furthermore, clinical observation supports the idea. It's quite common during the course of a cold or similar infection that patients will complain of having increased depressive symptoms.

However inflammation is a very generic phenomenon which implies a greatly diverse range of influences operating to bring about emergence of MDD. For example, depression frequently accompanies post-surgical recovery which evokes inflammatory responses even in the absence of infection.

While an infectious form of MDD is plausible, it wouldn't be the only important source of depressive conditions. In this sense, MDD is like a "final common pathway", the idea that clinically visible syndromes comes about through numerous paths. The key concept is that the mechanisms leading to the final path segment can be dissimilar and even non-overlapping.

It means there's truly no distinct, singular "cause" of the condition, or rather there are numerous disease processes that happen to present similarly.

kazinator• 12 years ago

I absolutely agree with this. Once I was hit by a bug that completely brought me down mentally for several days, before the physical symptoms hit (ending in emergency on IV). In the depressed state, I went on a job interview, and totally bombed.

Another person who caught the same thing had the same symptoms: dysphoria, low energy, no appetite --- and then the physical stuff: nausea, vomiting, dehydration, ...

It is entirely plausible that some viruses cause a protracted form of the former symptoms.

ada1981• 12 years ago

After healing myself from serious suicidal depression / mania without long term psychiatric drugs, what I can say is this..

Depression should be examined as a strategy one uses to avoid feeling past a certain threshold. Certain "emotional states" get coded in as unsafe in our implicit memory system and instead of experiencing the emotion we push it into our cortext where we can wrap a story around it..

Writing Gratitude letters is as effective as Prozac in many people; this was in fact one of my primary tools. The other was a commitment to feeling all my emotions without trying to escape them and to face the fear and anxiety directly. This felt like dying -- in fact this is what has been called "an ego death" or "spirtual rebirth". In Modern speak, I'd say this is the rough equivlent of using your cortext to bootstrap an emotional experience in the lymbic system that recodes implicit memory in the amygdala. It's damn hard to do, and for good reason -- you don't want to give write access to your source code to any old program.. This is why psyhedelics can work well -- they can rewrite those implicit emotional memories.

I've been having great success with this model with my coaching clients and am developing a more robust model and writings on this.. Of course, happy to provide my usual free session for benevolent hackers who may be struggling with "depression".

Reconceptualizing major depressive disorder as an infectious disease

Related Stories