Questioning Answers: Psychiatry and inflammation (again)

Friday, 8 August 2014

Psychiatry and inflammation (again)

I'd like to bring two papers to your attention in today's very quick post.

"The Death Star plans are not in the main computer"

First up is the article by Kahn & Sommer [1] (open-access) titled: 'The neurobiology and treatment of first-episode schizophrenia'. It's about as good a read as we have so far on the topic of "brain changes in the first phase of schizophrenia" and the various management options for first-episode schizophrenia. Outside of the very important fact that "It is highly unlikely that the pathogenesis of all patients with schizophrenia will be uniform", the authors make mention of the growing interest that "the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia is an increased proinflammatory status of the brain".

Continuing on the topic of inflammation and psychiatry, which has been mentioned previously on this blog, the article by Friedrich [2] (open-access) is also worth a read which also covers anti-inflammatory treatment in schizophrenia. This paper has also been talked about with reference to inflammatory mechanisms potentially related to cases of autism (see here for some commentary).

Cumulatively, these papers do a good job of bringing immune involvement in psychiatry to the forefront. The recent publication [3] suggestive of common genetic variants linked to schizophrenia and in particular "loci found in areas of the genome associated with the immune system" ties in well with the increased interest in issues like inflammation in relation to schizophrenia. The next question is 'where next?'.

Music from a local band to finish: Frankie and the Heartstrings with Hunger. They also run quite a nice shop/store too (see here).

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[1] Kahn RS. Sommer IE. The neurobiology and treatment of first-episode schizophrenia. Mol Psychiatry. 2014. July 22.

[2] Friedrich MJ. Research on Psychiatric Disorders Targets Inflammation. JAMA 2014. July 23.

[3] Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. Biological insights from 108 schizophrenia-associated genetic loci. Nature. 2014; 511: 421-427.

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