I just found out about PANS/PANDAS and I think it is fairly likely that I may have had PANS as a child. When I was 10 years old I woke up one day with horrible anxiety that i had never experienced before. I was obsessed with my health, constantly checking my body and thinking things felt wrong or that i had a terrible disease. The first thing I obsessed over was my eyesight, I thought it was horribly distorted in some way yet my vision was perfectly normal. Then I began obsessing over swallowing, breathing etc. Pretty much anything that I could worry about in regards to my body would be worried about. I had panic attacks consistently throughout each day and I could never fall asleep because I thought I would die in my sleep. For months I was fully convinced that life was a dream and that reality was just being "projected" to me. I had horrible anxiety/panic attacks about this because I thought that my family and everyone i loved didn't actually exist. Besides the psychiatric symptoms, around the time of their onset I had horrible allergies (later had my tonsils and adenoids removed which helped immensely) and stomach issues including intense aches, diarrhoea, and nausea that persisted for months. I didn't tell my parents about them because I was for some reason horribly embarrassed and ashamed by them. Around 2 years ago I had a mental health crisis/psychotic episode brought on by stress and ended up being hospitalized 4 times. I had severe depression and suicidal ideation and was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Eventually my psychiatrist had me tested for inflammation and I had extremely abnormally high levels of IL-6 (a pro-inflammatory cytokine). After I took medication to reduce the inflammation and ate a gluten-free/anti-inflammatory diet the IL-6 level went down to a normal range and my depression was almost completely gone. Currently, though, I have been having issues with a return of my health anxiety and anhedonia (I am not particularly depressed but I don't really get enjoyment out of any activities besides listening to music), which is why I would want to be tested for PANS to see if there is a problem with inflammation that could be causing these symptoms to come back, and to possibly see where/how the inflammation is occurring so that it can be better targeted and cured.
