Well, would ya look at that

Well, would ya look at that.

Yet another condition—one that is primarily marked by 1) psychological symptoms, 2) chronic fatigue, and 3) chronic pain—is found to be neuroinflammatory in origin!

This paper is FASCINATING, because the condition is associated...

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...with a history of traumatic events (including emotional trauma).

This shows that—even for psychological disorders that are known to directly result from psychological trauma—the etiology of the disorder is PHYSIOLOGICAL, not "mental."

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They again confirmed that serious psychological disorders can result from trauma such as:

serious accidents, employment issues, witnessing violence, etc.
- in childhood: exposure to neglect, abuse, domestic violence, loss of a parent, substance abuse, incarcerated family

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Critically, "ACE [adverse childhood event] + NLE [negative life event] score had a significant effect on all symptom domains.... The results . . . show that cytokines/chemokines/growth factors had significant effects on the symptom domains beyond the effects of ACE+NLEs"

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This led to a handful of conclusions, which I find absolutely fascinating:

First up, for MDMD (major dysmood disorder), the factor driving physiosomatic, fatigue-fibromyalgia, and gastrointestinal symptoms is the same factor driving pure depression, anxiety, and insomnia!

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Here's a visual representation of the statistical model that led to this result.

This is what's called a latent variable model, and this approach is just beautiful. It shows that about 40% of the psychological symptoms can be explained by history, and 60% are PHYSIOLOGICAL.
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Then, when they treat the immune network as a single latent variable, they once again find that over half of the variance in physio-affective symptoms can be explained by activation of the immune system.

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Here's my favorite part: this finding fits in with a variety of results that basically show that depressive and fatigue-fibromyalgia symptoms are directly related to the level of immune activation!

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The implication is simple: "Together, ACEs and NLEs appear to induce a pro-inflammatory network composed of cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors."

That is, psychological trauma can induce dysregulation of immune processes, leading to physiological symptoms.

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They conclude: "A larger part of the variances in the physioaffective phenome, and the physiosomatic FF and GIS symptom domains is explained by immune variables."

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To put it another way, psychological factors can lead to physiological dysfunction, but it's highly unlikely that further psychological intervention alone would make a difference without addressing the induced physiological dysfunction!

Paper: nature.com/articles/s4159...

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