[HN Gopher] Scientists: Protein IL-17 fights infection, acts on ...
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Scientists: Protein IL-17 fights infection, acts on the brain,
inducing anxiety
Author : wglb
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-04-14 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medicalxpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medicalxpress.com)
| wglb wrote:
| Related paper on receptors:
| https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00279-X
|
| Paper suggesting mood alteration:
| https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00278-8
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Any idea if this protein has any relation with seratonin? Could
| the effect of SSRIs be related in any way?
| boredemployee wrote:
| in case anyone wondering:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_i...
| noncoml wrote:
| That's a great question
| xattt wrote:
| Isoniazid has an antidepressant effect as a weak MAOI, but any
| interaction with IL-17 would be indirect and related to a
| reduced microbial load in TB.
| internet_rand0 wrote:
| seratonin is a molecule
|
| this is a protein[1]
|
| this question strikes me as asking if a quark has a relation
| with an atom
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleukin_17
| nartho wrote:
| A protein is a molecule What a strange reply
| jiggawatts wrote:
| "Chemistry literacy" is very poor in the general public
| because it has very few everyday applications, so
| everything learnt at school just drops out of people's
| brains.
|
| That's why your hear nonsense like "It has _chemicals_ in
| it!!!"
|
| It's also why you regularly see science fiction where
| characters can grow in seconds, totally breaking the law of
| conservation of matter.
| carabiner wrote:
| Serotonin has little relevance to depression and was more of a
| cute story doctors told patients in the '90s, that they were
| told by pharma reps.
| api wrote:
| AFAIK the truth is a little more complex: SSRIs do work for
| many people, but we don't really understand why and it's not
| as simple as 'more serotonin good.' They also don't work for
| everyone, and we don't understand why they don't work for
| some people either.
| dayvigo wrote:
| Serotonin can decrease IL-17 production, and IL-17 is highly
| elevated in depressed patients. Inflammation is elevated in
| depressed patients more generally, but baseline IL-17 levels
| specifically appear to be a good predictor for antidepressant
| response[1]. Anti-depressants are pretty much universally anti-
| neuroinflammatory.
|
| [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28698115/
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Yes, cytokine like IL 17 increase an enzyme called IDO which
| pulls tryptophan away from the serotonin production pathway.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Effect-of-IDO-on-seroton...
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| I guess depression makes for excellent self quaratine?
| biomcgary wrote:
| Yes, one would expect kin / group selection to play a role.
| jagaerglad wrote:
| this is rather amazing, I've always thought that my observation
| that I feel better in my brain after a good fever has to be
| imagination
| yapyap wrote:
| Yeah cause your point of reference is feeling like shit when
| you are feverish.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| Actually, there are some studies that show a anti-depressive
| effect from exposure to heat/fever like conditions. These are
| just two from a rudimentary Google search to check if I was
| remembering correctly.
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6519523/
| https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine-archive/node/2080
| gehwartzen wrote:
| I take mustard baths occasionally (about a cups worth) when I
| feel a cold or virus coming on which seems to kind of fast
| track clearing out whatever is causing it. Feel amazing after.
| Better than baseline as I've found a similar effect when not
| sick.
| vosper wrote:
| A cup of mustard powder? What does it feel like and how did
| you come across this?
| bitwize wrote:
| Possibly related to:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickness_behavior
| eveningsteps wrote:
| Surprisingly enough, this partially exposes the link between
| depression and some of the autoimmunal diseases. One example is
| how patients with psoriasis have significantly elevated levels of
| proteins from the IL-17 family (namely, IL-17A, IL-17C, and
| IL-17F) - up to 4 to 8 times above nominal values.
|
| At the same time, bimekizumab, one of the bleeding-edge psoriasis
| and psoriatic arthritis treatments, suppresses production of
| IL-17A and IL-17F (methotrexate does that, too, albeit to a much
| smaller degree). As a result, people receiving IL-17 suppressors
| become happier over the course of years, and not only due to
| months-long remission - I had a chance to see this in one of the
| experimental treatment programs.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Another aspect of this is that high levels of IL 17 can cause
| mania in bipolar patients.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27295856/
|
| I do not know why doctors are so hesitant to link the immune
| system and mood disorders. I have schizoaffective disorder and
| I see this expressing myself every time. For example, when I
| caught Covid, I had one of the worst psychotic episodes in my
| life. None of my doctors really cared about this important
| correlation.
|
| And I will scream this from the rooftops for as long as I can;
| mood disorders are immune disorders.
| derefr wrote:
| > I do not know why doctors are so hesitant to link the
| immune system and mood disorders.
|
| People who call themselves _doctors_ -- e.g. neurologists --
| generally aren 't hesitant to do this. But psychiatrists --
| and even moreso, therapists -- generally are. And
| psychiatrists+therapists lead the conversation on mood
| disorders, since that's who everyone is talking to about
| their mood disorders.
|
| IMHO it's just the hammer-and-nail thing. To a cardiologist,
| every medical problem is seen through a potentially
| cardiovascular lens; to an oncologist, every problem is a
| question of what type of cancer could cause it.
|
| Psychiatrists are technically medical doctors, but they spend
| their entire careers (after a few short years of school)
| focusing on psych cases; where these patients' problems
| either _are_ purely psychological (e.g. conditioned-response,
| traumatic-response, coping /defensive, attachment-related,
| etc.), or at best "we don't know" the degree to which they're
| psychological vs organic. (If we can recognize a problem as
| purely organic from the outset, that problem doesn't end up
| in the hands of a psychiatrist!) And either way, they usually
| see good results in clinical practice from treating the
| patient's mind, rather than addressing organic signs/symptoms
| directly. Even when they prescribe medication, they're
| measuring their success on a mental basis (using
| questionnaire-based instruments used to gauge mental changes)
| rather than observing changes in e.g. measurable behavioral
| signs. The problems they're faced with, and the successes
| they have _via_ these models, reinforce in psychiatrists a
| mind-centered mental model / worldview for psychiatric
| disease. (A model which is "the right one" to use in many
| psychological diseases! But not for many others.)
|
| And therapists aren't even medical doctors. They never learn
| much-at-all in school about potential organic causes of
| psychological (or medical) problems. They focus purely on
| this lens of "the mind", ignoring the lens of "the brain as
| an organ" entirely. This means that in clinical practice,
| when confronted with a problem that has both mental and
| organic aspects, a therapist will tend to ignore the organic
| aspects; and when confronted with a problem where the organic
| aspects are too large to ignore, the therapist will simply
| refer to a psychiatrist (or neurologist, _maybe_ ) -- with no
| follow-up, and thereby, no way to end up learning what the
| patient's problem actually was and thereby evolving the
| neurological side of their understanding.
| xerxes901 wrote:
| I don't know what you're basing this on. Good psychiatrists
| absolutely "call themselves doctors" and definitely seek to
| exclude or treat organic causes of psychiatric symptoms.
| All the psychiatrists I know absolutely understand there's
| a link between the immune system and mood disorders and
| will involve immunology/rheumatology for these things.
|
| Your ideas about how psychiatry is practiced might have
| been correct in the 1950's but they're a world away from
| how it's done in the 2020s.
| Zufriedenheit wrote:
| Is that ,,becoming happier" also observed with TNF blockers
| like Adalimumab?
| null_name wrote:
| Interesting, I take risankizumab, which looks like it
| indirectly suppresses IL-17 (through suppressing IL-23A). I've
| been on it for a bit less than a year, and I can't say if I've
| had improved mood. Maybe? It definitely fixed the psoriasis.
| Might also have contributed to me getting sick more often,
| though.
|
| I wish I had kept logs with some sort of self-screen depression
| instrument now (maybe the BDI? I don't like the PHQ-9). Might
| as well start now.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Ketamine curbs IL-17 secretion pretty hard. Psoriasis tends to
| vanish pretty quick after a therapy session.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| Based on your knowledge and experiences, do you think the
| benefits are worth the potential side-effects?
|
| I fully understand that after a certain point of disease
| severity, the right choices tend to become more apparent.
| However, I have been offered such medications in the past, but
| I have always refused.
|
| From what I understand, many of the serious side-effects are
| rare. However, once Pandora is out of the box, it's not always
| easy to get her back inside.
| chaps wrote:
| This is interesting! I've been having some pretty bad
| intermittent panic attacks over the past year or so and a thing
| I've noticed is that I have general inflammation across my body
| along with the panic attacks. For a long while I thought it was
| an infected tooth, but with that fixed and the panic attacks
| still ongoing, I'm not sure! But this is a nice confirmation that
| there's some correlation.
| mleonhard wrote:
| Related paper on the immune system triggering anxiety: "Stress-
| Induced Metabolic Disorder in Peripheral CD4+ T Cells Leads to
| Anxiety-like Behavior" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.10.001
|
| Related: "N-acetylcysteine as a new prominent approach for
| treating psychiatric disorders" https://doi.org/10.1111/bph.15456
| section "2.3 Regulation of inflammatory mediators".
|
| N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is considered safe and is sold as a diet
| supplement in USA and many other countries. If you suffer from
| anxious feelings, 1200mg/day NAC may reduce them a lot.
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