Is Depression An Immune-Mediated Disease?
A new study uses white blood cell measurements to predict response in rTMS treatment.
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily-enough health-themed newsletter. One idea I've been mulling over for a while is the connection between immune function and psychiatric symptoms.
I see a lot of patients who end up having immunological disorders or autoimmune diseases, and I have a confirmed track record of accurate referrals to rheumatology that I'm inordinately proud of. I first got interested in this topic thanks to some work I did on a series of review papers I senior authored with my friends, especially first author Burton Tabaac, M.D., related to psychedelic medicines. In our paper on psilocybin, we highlight its role as a plausible anti-inflammatory agent:
It has been well-established that inflammation is associated with psychiatric disorders, with biochemical markers of inflammation noted in psychiatric populations. However, the direction of causality between inflammation and psyc…