Depressive Disorder Affects TME and Hormonal Changes Promoting Tumour Deterioration Development

作者：Jingjing Dong, Juan Du, Ruyun Liu, Xinghua Gao, Yixiao Wang, Lin Ma, Yong Yang, Jing Wu, Jianqiang Yu, Ning Liu · 发表于：Immunology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1111/imm.13933 · 被引用次数：11 · 研究领域：Cancer, Stress, Anesthesia, and Immune Response、Stress Responses and Cortisol、Tryptophan and brain disorders

Cancer patients often suffer from depression, the presence of which promotes the deterioration of the cancer patient's condition and thus affects the patient's survival. However, the exact mechanisms underlying the relationship between depression and tumour progression remain unclear, and this complexity involves multi-system and multi-level interactions, with several key challenges remaining in current research. First, the extreme complexity of biological systems. Depression and tumors involve multiple pathways such as neuroendocrine, immune system, and metabolism, respectively, and there are nonlinear interactions between these pathways (e.g., HPA axis activation affects both immunosuppression and tumor angiogenesis), so it is difficult to isolate the predominant role of a single mechanism, and there are feedback loops (e.g., inflammatory factors (e.g., IL-6) can both induce depressive symptoms and promote tumor growth) form a "feedback loop between depression and tumors" that makes it difficult to determine the direction of causality. Second, the potential blind spot of mechanism research. There is insufficient direct evidence for the brain-tumor axis, and it is known that the vagus nerve or sympathetic nerves can directly modulate the tumor microenvironment (TME) (e.g., via β-adrenergic receptors), but there is a lack of technical support for in vivo imaging on how the CNS remotely affects tumors through the neural circuits; whereas depression-associated disturbances of t...