My 17 year old daughter suddenly had a psychiatric breakdown where she told me she has been hearing a mean voice telling her horrible things and urging her to harm herself. At the same time she started getting severe acne and extreme social anxiety. She then admitted to me that she had heard the voice at times of stress throughout her life. I took her to a very reputable adolescent psychiatrist who diagnosed her with anxiety and assured me she was not schizophrenic which was my biggest fear. He prescribed ssris which made it all worse. and she had to be hospitalized because the voice started telling her to kill herself. I had a feeling her problems had to do with her early childhood strep infections and/or her catching mono at age 8. She and I checked into PANDAS and both felt it was a strong possibility. Coincidentally at the same time we were going through this crisis, I got news that Arizona State University had recently released results of a study revealing that fecal microbiota transplant therapy (FMT) had shown very encouraging results with autistic children. Since my oldest child has autism I began to research fmt and saw many accounts that it worked remarkably well for anxiety. I started realizing that if fmt works as is claimed it is essentially an immune system transplant, since most of our immune system is in our gut and it is basically a gut transplant. I couldn't find any accounts of people doing it for PANDAS. I was extremely desperate to help my poor daughter, and excited to try fmt for my son. Since I didn't want to wait around for the ensuing FDA trials I took my children to Australia and had them do fmt with a gastroenterologist that specializes in fmt there. My daughter began to lose symptoms beginning in the second week and by week four had no symptoms left at all. She has not had even one anxiety attack, the voice is gone, the other symptoms are gone. It has been three months and she is 100% symptom free. She has gone off all meds (she was on risperdal for the voices) without any return or symptoms. I can't really prove she had PANDAS (but I believe she did) but I just wanted to share in case it could help anyone else. My son has normal stool for the first time in his life, has lost 20 pounds, and everyone around me says they see huge improvement in him. I feel he is doing well and am happy to see his stool look normal, and he is definitely doing well but for me only time will tell. They say it takes a long time to see the autism symptoms start to diminish. This journey was extremely expensive but we were desperate, and actually it wasn't as expensive as the hospitalization, etc. my daughter went through. I don't want to give false hope. I want to share in case it makes sense to any parents to try like it did to me.
