Rhonda Patrick· PhD
So these folks they’re anthropologist at the University New Mexico, actually went down to this group called the Tsimane, which they’re kind of agriculturalists semi hunters gatherers down in the lowlands of Bolivia. So they actually went down there to test these ideas, and so they they developed these really culturally appropriate depression questionnaires, and then they drew their blood and looked at their inflammatory status. And very consistent with the idea that this link between inflammation and depression is an evolved old thing, they found, first off, they found that folks living in this completely different much closer to the way most humans lived across most of the time, depression looks very much like it does here. People do get depressed. They get depressed for a lot of the same reasons. Depression was powerfully correlated with increased inflammation. Interestingly, when they did functional assays, the depressed people showed better immune responses to some of the pathogens, some of the types of things that would be pathogens in their world, again suggesting that there’s a link between depression and actually increased survival from infection.