NIMH Director, Dr. Tom Insel, blog’s about PANDAS in “From Paresis to PANDAS & PANS“. This post is part of the recent burst of attention given to PANDAS and the newly proposed syndrome PANS including the recent NIMH press release, updated NIMH website, and Drs. Swedo, Leckman, and Rose’s White Paper published in Pediatric and Therapeutics.
From Paresis to PANDAS & PANS by Dr. Thomas Insel
In a visit to a mental asylum in 1912 you would have seen many patients with “general paresis.” The word “paresis” is Latin for weakness. General paresis was a form of psychosis with delusions, hallucinations, and memory problems often of rapid onset and thought to be due to a general constitutional weakness. At least that was the explanation until 1913, when general paresis was shown to be caused by syphilitic infection of the brain. The first treatments were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1917. The advent of antibiotics 30 years later led to the virtual eradication of neuro-syphilis, as the disorder came to be called, in this country.The idea that mental or behavioral disorders could be due to infection is, therefore, not new but it remains surprisingly difficult to accept. When I was in training in the 1970′s, peptic ulcer disease was the prototype of a biopsychosocial disorder, with stress and a Type A personality considered the causes and psychodynamic therapy recommended as the treatment. Although helicobacter pylori was identified as the cause of peptic ulcer disease by Australians Robin Warren and Barry Marshall in the 1980′s, there was very little awareness (within the mental health community) that the disorder could be cured with antibiotics until Warren and Marshall received the Nobel Prize in 2005.
We may be looking at a similar reluctance to accept an infectious cause of pediatric sudden onset obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in a debate that has been ongoing for almost two decades. In the early l990s, pediatrician Dr. Susan Swedo identified a subgroup of children whose OCD symptom onset didn’t fit the typical pattern. Instead of emerging gradually over weeks or months, they experienced ferocious bouts of compulsive behaviors and other symptoms overnight and out of the blue.As a pediatrician, Swedo’s familiarity with the ways of infectious agents and autoimmune mechanisms, together with her careful observations in the child psychiatry clinic of the NIMH Intramural Research Program, sparked the surprising hypothesis that a strep infection could trigger OCD symptoms via an autoimmune process. more
