Are Chronic Inflammation and Its Metabolic Counterpart, Insulin Resistance, the Common Denominators for All Chronic Behavior and Neurodegenerative Disorders? A Review of the Evidence – Part III

The Complicated Relationship Between Antidepressant Medication and Inflammation Assuming that inflammation plays an important role in all neurodegenerative and mood disorders, as I suggested in the first two installments of this series, another important question must be asked. Even though, as I will discuss, efficacy of antidepressant medication is highly variable with depression, when it is effective could the reason be an impact on inflammation as opposed to the generally accepted mechanism of optimization of neurotransmitter activity, principally serotonin? If this is true, it would certainly provide powerful proof that inflammation is as much of a cause of depression as is neurotransmitter imbalance, and maybe more so. However, even if antidepressants are not proven to have an anti-inflammatory effect, this does not conclusively document that inflammation has no role in depression. Why? Given the fact, as I mentioned above, that antidepressants demonstrate poor efficacy so often, the presence of chronic CNS inflammation could also prove why antidepressants are not effective. With this complexity in mind, I would like to examine both sides of this controversy.