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Comment by standardly | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time making sense of parts of this article.

RE: Treatment:

"“What is we can track the body temperature of people with depression to time heat-based treatments well?”

"If thermoregulation is a symptom of depression, as the Oura Ring study suggests, temperature treatment could be an effective way to treat depression."

Thermoregulation is a symptom of depression? How do they reach the conclusion that "temperature treatment" could treat depression, and why do they not define what "temperature treament" even is? As someone with MDD I seriously doubt making myself warm more often is going to affect my symptoms, but it's certainly an alluring concept as I do enjoy saunas.

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The article is not very good, but the overall direction seem to check out quite well with other research. There seem to be a proven correlation between inflammation and depression. Furthermore anti-inflammatory drugs seem to provide efficient anti-depressant care in some cases. They would lover your body temperature too.

Conversely I can imagine regular visits to a sauna to affect chronic inflammation processes in your body in some way and then potentially affect the depression too.

Overall I have a strong feeling that depression itself is very akin to fever: a symptom of a very wide range of different problems that require different treatments. Sometimes just the symptomatic care is sufficient, sometimes it's even essential or else you die. Anti-inflammatory drugs are a thing and so are the anti-depressants. But studying and treating depression as a distinct disease probably makes no more sense than studying and treating fever as a distinct disease.

It looks like a medical anti pattern, deal with the symptom that the base disease will cure itself, somewhat, maybe magically.

I know that forcing a happy face could lighten up a bit your mood, but this is going too far, and maybe is too simplistic in its view of depression.

A few things things:

- causation is difficult to establish

- symptoms can sometimes themselves be a proximal cause

- treatment of symptoms is one way to determine causation

worth adding:

- treating symptoms might help break at least part of a bad feedback loop

This is just my hunch, but I think temperature treatment is the wrong conclusion to this finding. When someone is sick with a virus and has a fever, people suggest taking ibuprofen to lower the fever effectively masking the symptoms, but that does nothing to address the underlying cause.

I think this finding can be helpful is trying to find other ways to reduce inflammation in the body (assuming inflammation is driving the temperature increase) Interventions like diet changes could lead to both less inflammation and less depression.

There’s research that getting really hot (ie with hot saunas) can affect depression. One interesting supporting finding is that if you run around but don’t get hot (ie don’t sweat) then the exercise doesn’t do much for depression

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