Summary
Dr. Charles Raison explores the connection between depression and the immune system, discussing how inflammation affects mood and the brain-body connection in mental health.
Key Points
- Depression has immune system components
- Inflammation affects brain function and mood
- The gut-brain axis influences mental health
- Heat therapy shows antidepressant effects
- Stress and immunity are interconnected
- Holistic approaches address multiple pathways
Key Moments
How sauna lifts mood: dynorphin primes endorphin receptors for lasting anti-anxiety effect
Heat releases dynorphin, which sensitizes endorphin receptors. This may explain lasting mood improvement weeks after sauna use.
"And, of course, yeah, you pay a little bit of a price in terms of tissue damage, but it's like the smoke alarm principle. That little bit of damage is more than outweighed for the one time you don't do it and then you die. Yeah, right. And so it totally makes sense because the gut is what is exposed to the internal environment. I mean, you think about it, that's the big one, right? I mean, the skin is a much more robust protector. Any membrane that's wet is just bad news in that way, but it has to be for us to survive and eat. And this is sort of the compromise that we've evolved. I'm pretty interested in you're mentioning this hyperthermia in terms of people that are depressed having elevated core body temperature. I'm super interested in the study that you published where you had used whole body hyperthermia to treat major depressive disorder. And at least a single bout of it seemed to have a lasting effect for six weeks. Whole body hyperthermia, to me, it sounds very similar to using something like a sauna. It is. Would you say it is? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just the heat. I mean, the machine's fancy. It's like a $50,000 machine. It uses infrared lights. It kind of cooks you from the inside out, and that allows you to get hotter with less misery. Because saunas, I mean, you're getting it right on your... It's hard, right? It's definitely hard. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big steam room sauna fan, but the box is very different. So I put myself in this machine to see what I was doing to people. And I've never been. So to back up, yes, you're right. And we did do a study. And we treat people to a core body temperature of 38.5 centigrade, which is 101 point something or other, which is unbelievably hot if you don't want to be that hot. I mean, you know, so I mean, I had never been that hot in my life. I mean, sweat was just pouring off my body and I was huffing and puffing. I felt like I'd been running for 10 miles out in the Sonoran Desert summer, you know. It's really hot. It's mild hyperthermia, but it's hot. Now, we have colleagues, David Michelon and Maren Nyer at Harvard, that have joined us in hyperthermia work. And she especially is interested and has a grant to study hot yoga and convince people to wear a rectal probe while they're doing hot yoga. And hot yoga, which also makes people sweat like pigs, elevates core body temperature to, interestingly, exactly the same place, 38.5. And a lot of people, when I talk about hyperthermia and give talks to folks, a lot of people, if it's a crowd, will come up afterwards and say, well, you know, hot yoga. A lot of people are hooked on hot yoga. And it's because, I'm convinced, it's because it's an antidepressant strategy, that they are essentially doing something very similar to what we do in the box. And, you know, most people, it took about an hour, hour and a half for most people to get up to that 38.5. And then when that happened, we turned off the heat, but we left people in the box because it stayed warm and their core body tapered, elevated for at least another hour. So even the timing of hot yoga is probably consistent with sort of our hypothermia machine. So the hot yoga, a sauna, I mean, maybe a hot bath, like you'd be saying. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically anything that's... It's the heat. Yeah, it's the heat. And there's some interesting data on hot baths improving autistic symptoms, right? And there's people looking at this in New York, right? So yeah, there's a story there. Yeah. So there's a personal story for me in terms of the sauna. One of the reasons why I got so into using the sauna was because in graduate school, I lived across the street from a YMCA and they had a sauna there. And so I was just, you know, using the sauna and I'd go into this, I'd use the sauna before I would go into the lab and do my experiments for the day. And, you know, as you know, graduate school is extremely stressful, failed experiments, sometimes setting you back, you know, six months and lots of stress. Yeah, I mean, just 16-hour experiments you have to do, and you've got to publish, and then you've got to publish, publish, you know, so it's very stressful."
