The challenge of Inflammation, including Developmental Inflammation in Psychiatric Disorders

I'm not against "Coping Skills" or "Resilience" BUT if we have the ability to measure inflammation and have appropriate anti-inflammatory medications --- maybe we should consider using them.
 
Sources of "NEURO-INFLAMMATION" can look DIFFERENT:

• ​NEURO-DEVELOPMENTAL INFLAMMATION IN UTERO
  • Mom had an infection, flu, auto-immune disorder, her own trauma, and/or drugs, alcohol or smoking.
  • NEURO-DEVELOPMENTAL INFLAMMATION is probably involved in most NEURO-DIVERSITY and PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS on some level.

 

• CHILDHOOD TRAUMA AND/OR ADVERSITY

 

• ENVIRONMENTAL TOXINS

 

• ADULT TRAUMA

 

• HIGH ALTITUDE REGIONS may present specific challenges to the person with SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTAL INFLAMMATION.
  • ​This needs to be included as a FACTOR in integrated physical and mental health care for PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS.

 
The OLD FRIENDS HYPOTHESIS along with recent discoveries positing that the "IMMUNE SYSTEM CONTROLS SOCIAL BEHAVIOR" helps us to understand why things like:

• ​TRAUMA
• ALTITUDE
• ALLERGIES, and even
• An Outsized Sensitivity to the Social Environment (Say what?)

​          ---- All are  RELATED to the IMMUNE SYSTEM and INCREASED RISK of PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS,       highlighting that while some sources of NEURO-INFLAMMATION 
are MUNDANE and BORING ---others belong on an episode of DATELINE.

​It is SURPRIZING that the IMMUNE SYSTEM is involved in SOCIAL BEHAVIOR.
It seems as though other systems of the body -- NOT JUST THE BRAIN --- have expansive MONITORING MISSIONS and this certainly seems true for the IMMUNE SYSTEM.

• ​It seems to me RELIGION has been an important "OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE" to provide an ESCAPE HATCH from decidedly IMPERFECT SOCIAL ORDERS where SUFFICIENT CHANGE may not come in your LIFETIME.​
  • ​If those RELIGIONS don't make sense to us anymore --- we still need an ESCAPE HATCH from the decidedly IMPERFECT SOCIAL ORDER --- if nothing else so we can catch our breath to REFORM it.
  • I think the "OLD FRIENDS HYPOTHESIS" helps explain why we are SO SENSITIVE to these issues and it comes back to an OVERLY SENSITIVE IMMUNE SYSTEM if you mesh:
    • ​Graham Rook at Kings College London with the
    • Research of Jonathan Kipnis while at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

 

• So widespread NEURO-INFLAMMATION is telling us a lot about the HEALTH of the POPULATION -- it's also IRONICALLY telling us a lot about the HEALTH of the SOCIETY.

Keith Morrison of Dateline

​Inflammation–

Nature's Way to Efficiently Respond to All Types of Challenges:

Implications for Understanding and Managing “the Epidemic” of Chronic Diseases (2018)

Siloed or singular system approach to disease management is common practice, developing out of traditional medical school education.

​Textbooks of medicine describe a huge number of discrete diseases, usually in a systematic fashion following headings like etiology, pathology, investigations, differential diagnoses, and management.

This approach suggests that the body has a multitude of ways to respond to harmful incidences.

However, physiology and systems biology provide evidence that there is a simple mechanism behind this phenotypical variability.

​Regardless if an injury or change was caused by trauma, infection, non-communicable disease, autoimmune disorders, or stress, the typical physiological response is:

an increase in blood supply to the area, an increase in white cells into the affected tissue, an increase in phagocytic activity to remove the offending agent, followed by a down-regulation of these mechanisms resulting in healing.

The cascade of inflammation is the body‘s unique mechanism to maintain its integrity in response to macroscopic as well as microscopic injuries.

We hypothesize that chronic disease development and progression are linked to uncontrolled or dysfunctional inflammation to injuries regardless of their nature, physical, environmental, or psychological.

Thus, we aim to reframe the prevailing approach of management of individual diseases into a more integrated systemic approach of treating the “person as a whole,” enhancing the patient experience, ability to a make necessary changes, and maximize overall health and well-being.

The first part of the paper reviews the local immune cascades of pro- and anti-inflammatory regulation and the interconnected feedback loops with neural and psychological pathways.

The second part emphasizes one of nature's principles at work--system design and efficiency.

Continually overwhelming this finely tuned system will result in systemic inflammation allowing chronic diseases to emerge; the pathways of several common conditions are described in detail.

The final part of the paper considers the implications of these understandings for clinical care and explore how this lens could shape the physician-patient encounter and health system redesign.

We conclude that healthcare professionals must advocate for an anti-inflammatory lifestyle at the patient level as well as at the local and national levels to enhance population health and well-being.

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​Val's Note:  Advocating for an "anti-inflammatory lifestyle" is fine as far as it goes -- but what are we going to do with respect to NEURO-DIVERSITY (NEURO-DEVELOPMENTAL "DISORDERS") and PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS that are largely resulting from DEVELOPMENTAL INFLAMMATION and EPIGENETIC  CHANGES?

Are we just going to BLAME Mom -- is that the ANSWER?

​Further, we have OLYMPIC ATHLETES with NEURO-DEVELOPMENTAL & PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS --- If we are not recognizing that the "anti-inflammatory lifestyle" prescription while important is woefully insufficient for NEURO-DEVELOPMENTAL & PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS --- we're MISSING THE BOAT, primarily because it has ALREADY SAILED.]