Response regarding inflammation as a predictor of depression in heart failure

Abstract

The main criticisms by Glover and colleagues of our “Short Report” (Wirtz et al., 2009) relate primarily to the fact that our study was exploratory, which is fully acknowledged in the paper. However, the point of publishing an exploratory paper is to allow other researchers to view provocative preliminary findings in order to gain insight into promising avenues of investigation. We reported that the circulating inflammatory biomarker sICAM-1 independently predicted depression severity (as assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)) in a prospective design at both 12 and 18 months later in 30 heart failure (HF) patients. We controlled for cardiovascular risk factors, indicators of HF severity, and medication intake. This finding potentially suggests that vascular inflammation precedes depression in HF patients. Glover et al. have apparently misunderstood that our findings are limited to HF patients since they attempted negate our findings by using examples from other populations.