IL6 and major depressive disorder: These findings suggest that depression and inflammation might cause CVD through separate physiological pathways, such as elevated interleukin-6 upstream of CRP (Ridker, 2016), triglycerides (Parekh et al., 2017), cortisol as a result of stress-induced hyperactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (Jokinen and Nordstrom, 2009), endothelial dysfunction (Chen et al., 2011) and platelet activation (Williams et al., 2014).