A new study has found children with raised levels of inflammation may lead to an increased risk of developing psychosis disorders, severe depression, and high levels of insulin resistance when they're in their 20s. So, what's causing the inflammation and are we on a road to preventative treatment? Health report presenter Dr Norman Swan says the immune system could be playing a role in our mental health.
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00:00What they were really doing was exploring a question which is why do most mental health
00:07issues like depression, psychosis, bipolar disorder, start in adolescence?
00:14What's the explanation for it?
00:15And over the last few years, there's been increasing interest in the role of the immune
00:20system in the brain.
00:21So there are immune cells in the brain and the immune system affects how the brain works.
00:28And the question is, could this be cause and effect?
00:31So in other words, I mean, it could be nothing whatsoever to do with mental health issues,
00:36but could the immune system have a role?
00:37And it's been increasingly believed that it does.
00:40And therefore, where do these problems in the immune system in the brain come from?
00:47And this study is a study that started in the early 90s in Britain, following parents
00:53and babies through the years, looking at all sorts of aspects of their health and
00:58development through the years.
01:01And they particularly looked at something called inflammation.
01:04And inflammation is when the immune system is turned on.
01:08So something's going wrong, don't know what it is, it could be an infection or it could
01:12be something else, and we'll come back to that in a minute.
01:14And it's been turned on, and it's like an artillery barrage.
01:18So it's nonspecific, it's just the immune system flares up and gets angry.
01:24And there are blood tests you can do to measure, in a sense, how angry the immune system is.
01:30And they did three of these tests at the age of nine, age of 15, and age of 17, and looked
01:36at whether or not these kids had mental health issues or metabolic issues like leading to
01:40diabetes at the age of 24.
01:43And what they showed was that kids whose inflammation levels peaked at age nine, in
01:50other words, they were high at age nine, then tailed off a bit, those were the ones who
01:55were at increased risk, up to five times the risk of depression, severe depression, psychosis,
02:02and indeed metabolic problems, at the age of 24.
02:06Now there are various things that could turn it on, infection, but they eliminated infection
02:11as one of the causes of this.
02:16Polluted air increases inflammation because it's like smoking, if I'm particular air pollution.
02:21But also it's noticed that chronic stress from the environment, either in the family
02:26or in the surrounding area of where the child's growing up, is that a child under stress,
02:33the brain picks that up as a threat and turns on the immune system, and inflammation turns
02:40on not because of an infection, but because the world around the child is threatening
02:46in a sort of subtle kind of way.
02:50So this could be the link between, we know that environmental issues in children do increase
02:56the risk of mental health issues, and this could be the explanation.
03:01Environmental health issues, social and physical, stimulation of the immune system, and that
03:07having an effect on the brain producing mental health.
03:09It does seem that if the inflammation peaks later in life, at 15 or 17, they're not at
03:16the same risk.
03:17So yeah, this is something that happens in a child's early years and maybe primary school
03:22years, if indeed it's real.
03:24But there's other evidence to suggest this is a real effect.