Inflammation Associated with Cognitive Deficits
At the 2019 meeting of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, researcher Katherine E. Burdick and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School reported that in 240 patients with bipolar disorder who were not currently having a manic or depressive episode, markers of inflammation were associated with cognitive deficits.
Inflammation was associated with cognitive deficits in general, and there were also some relationships between specific inflammatory markers and types of cognitive processing. They found that the inflammatory markers TNF-alpha, TNFR1, and TNFR2 influenced cognitive flexibility. The inflammatory marker VEGF influenced reward processing, while IL-6/IL-6r influenced spatial processing. IL-1beta and IL-1RA influenced social cognition.
Burdick and colleagues found it was important to include both primary and secondary mediators of inflammation in their research “as the effects of the primary pro-inflammatory cytokines can be blocked by a number of decoy receptors and soluble antagonists.” Elevations in these can provide additional information about the function of the immune system.
Editor’s Note: Targeting inflammation with the anti-inflammatory treatments minocycline and celecoxib has been shown to improve depression. Now the role of anti-inflammatory drugs in improving cognition deserves further attention.
Meta-Analysis Shows Inflammation is Common in Unipolar Depression, Bipolar Depression, and Schizophrenia
In a symposium at the 2016 meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, Mark Hyman Rapaport described the results of his research group’s meta-analysis of studies comparing levels of inflammation in the blood of people with unipolar depression, bipolar depression, and schizophrenia. Rapaport and colleagues determined that people acutely ill with any of the three illnesses showed abnormally high levels of certain inflammatory proteins. These included: interleukin-1beta, interleukin-6, TNF alpha, and c-reactive protein. Those who were chronically ill showed elevations in interleukin-6.
These data are consistent with increasing evidence that inflammation also occurs in the brain. Brain inflammation can be observed by measuring translocator protein binding, a measure of brain microglial activation, using positron emission tomography (PET) scans.
Brain Inflammation Found in Autopsy Studies of Teen and Adult Suicides
Suicide and depression have both been linked to elevated levels of inflammatory cytokines in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid. A recent study finds that these inflammatory markers are also elevated in the brains of teens and depressed adults who died from suicide.
In autopsy studies, researcher Ghanshyam N. Pandey measured levels of the inflammatory cytokines interleukin-1beta, interleukin 6, and TNF-alpha in the brains of teen suicide victims, and compared these to the brains of teens who died from other causes. Pandey also measured levels of interleukin-1beta, interleukin 6, interleukin 8, interleukin 10, interleukin 13, and TNF-alpha in the prefrontal cortex of depressed adult suicide victims and compared them to levels in adults who died of other causes.
There were abnormalities in the inflammatory markers in the brains of those who died from suicide compared to their matched controls. The suicide victims had higher levels of interleukin-1beta, interleukin 6, and TNF-alpha than the controls. Among the adults, levels of the anti-inflammatory cytokine interleukin 10 were low in the suicide victims while levels of Toll-like receptors (TLR3 and TLR4), which are involved in immune mechanisms, were high.
Brain inflammation has also been observed in positron emission tomography (PET) scans of depressed patients, where signs of microglial activation can be observed. Elevated inflammatory cytokines are also found in the blood of some people with bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia.
Pandey presented this research at the 2016 meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry.
