Arthritis drug may help beat depression
A common arthritis injection could offer new hope to millions of people struggling with depression; researchers claim it may work better than traditional antidepressants for some patients.
Scientists have found that the drug tocilizumab, which is already used in the NHS to treat inflammatory conditions such as arthritis, led to improvement in more than half of patients with hard-to-treat depression.
The findings raise hopes that depression may be caused by inflammation and not always just brain chemistry.
Around one in six Britons suffer from depression, while standard treatments such as antidepressants and talking therapies do not work for many patients.
Unlike traditional depression medications that target chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine, tocilizumab blocks an inflammatory protein called interleukin-6, or IL-6.
Growing evidence suggests that inflammation may play an important role in mental health, with about a third of people with depression showing signs of low-grade inflammation in their blood.
Researchers from the University of Bristol followed 30 people with moderate to severe depression who failed to improve with antidepressants and showed inflammatory markers in repeated blood tests.
Participants were divided into two groups. One received weekly injections of tocilizumab for four weeks, while the other received a placebo.
The results, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, showed that the drug group experienced greater improvements in depression severity, fatigue, anxiety and quality of life.
More strikingly, 54 percent of patients given tocilizumab went into remission, compared with 31 percent in the placebo group.
The researchers emphasized that the small study did not prove the drug was superior, but said the findings were encouraging.
Study co-author Golam Khandakar, professor of psychiatry and immunology at the University of Bristol, said: “This study represents a significant milestone in the development of new treatments for particularly difficult-to-treat depression, which affects millions of people in the UK alone.
“This is one of the first randomized controlled trials to test immunotherapy for depression, the first to test IL-6 as a treatment target, and the first to use a targeted approach to select patients most likely to benefit and show that it works.”
Study co-author Eimear Foley, senior research fellow in immunopsychiatry at the University of Bristol, added: “Depression is estimated to affect around 10 to 20 per cent of people worldwide over their lifetime, but for many patients existing treatments do not work well enough.
“Our work moves us closer to more specialized depression care, where treatments are chosen to better suit a person’s biology.
“This will help us deliver the right treatment to the right patients at the right time.”
Larger studies are now needed to confirm whether targeting inflammation could revolutionize the treatment of depression, the researchers said.
