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I was wondering if there's a link between misophonia, arithmomania and epilepsy (I have all 3 of these). If anyone doesn't know, misophonia is where you consistently have a really strong emotional reaction to very specific sounds, which can cause you to change your behavior (like avoiding people or covering your ears). Some of the worst things for me are: this one girl at school who would eat snacks and pop gum ALL class long, every single day. The chewing and snapping gum became unbearable to the point where I was plugging my ears with my fingers for the entire class, or listening to extremely loud white noise via earbuds. Then there's my dad, who makes this clicking sound with his mouth that makes me want to cry 'cause it bothers me so much. Also, my parents eat pork rinds a lot, and I just can't be in the room with them at all. That's just the tip of the iceberg. As for arithmomania, that's like, umm, an obsession with counting I guess. There's already another forum post on here for it I believe. I've read that it might be OCD but I'm not sure. So, I count the number of letters in words, the number of pen strokes in the letters of words, the number of words in a sentence, etc. I change the spelling and height of letters in words (i.e. capital to lowercase) to make a visually appealing pattern (i.e. "Nintendo"). I prefer certain numbers, like 10 and 4, for these things and other little word/letter things I do. Hopefully you get the gist. These word counting games are quietly going on in my head almost all the time, like background noise, even at this very moment. And finally, as for epilepsy, I have juvenile myoclonic epilepsy. I've had it for at least 4 years, but only 2 seizures overall. The arithmomania has been in the last 2 or 3 years I think, and the misophonia showed up less than a year ago. Oh, and I'm 18 years old, if that matters at all. So...is there any connection between any of those 3 things? What's up with my brain?? And do I have OCD? I haven't been diagnosed with OCD, although besides the counting, apparently I do have other potential OCD symptoms like repetitive violent thoughts that really scare me.... I'm not depressed or anything though. Life is good, but terrible thoughts of hurting myself and other people and animals keep popping into my head, and that makes me feel guilty and scared of myself, because I don't actually want to hurt anyone. These thoughts have been going on for over a year now, and it's always been the same ones. Like...stabbing myself in the eye, or stabbing one of my family members.... I can use knives but they make me nervous. I just want it to stop.... What should I do??

Heard this story on NPR today, and I'm encouraged by yet another link between neurological disorders, pathogens and immune response. IMHO, each and every "find" like this strengthens the rightful destiny of PANDAS/PANs as a DSMV-worthy illness that will, one day, no longer be referred to as either "controversial" or "rare." Scientists may have solved the mystery of nodding syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy that has disabled thousands of children in East Africa. The syndrome seems to be caused by the immune system's response to a parasitic worm, an international team reports in the journal Science Translational Medicine. And they think it's the same worm responsible for river blindness, an eye infection that's also found in East Africa. The finding means that current efforts to eliminate river blindness should also reduce nodding syndrome, says Avi Nath, an author of the study and chief of the section of infections of the nervous system at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. But the only clue that seemed to hold up was that affected children lived in areas where river blindness was common. This clue was puzzling, though, because even though nodding syndrome is a brain disease, the parasite that causes river blindness doesn't seem to infect the brain. After returning from Uganda, Nath decided to search for an explanation. "He pulled all of the lab together as a team and asked us to each investigate different components" of the syndrome, says Tory Johnson, an assistant professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins who was working for Nath at the time. She is also an author of the new study. Johnson's assignment was to see whether the body's own immune system might play a role. So she began screening blood samples from people with nodding syndrome. Other scientists had also looked for an immune response. But Johnson's search was much more extensive. "We looked at everything that was available," she says. Johnson had discovered that in people with nodding syndrome, the immune system was targeting a protein found in certain muscle cells. It looked as if the body was attacking itself. The question was whether the immune system's attack also included the brain. So Johnson started looking to see whether the targeted protein was in brain cells. "And lo and behold she found that yes, it was not only present in the brain, there were actually large amounts of it present in neurons," Nath says. "So the story really came together very nicely." The full story, the team's hypothesis, goes like this: When a person is infected with the river blindness parasite, the immune system begins sending antibodies to attack the invader. These antibodies identify their enemy by looking for a specific protein in the parasite's cells. Unfortunately, the target protein in the parasite looks a lot like a protein found in certain brain cells. So these brain cells become unintended casualties of the body's efforts to protect itself. The discovery shows why it's important to treat children soon after they are infected with the parasite, Nath says. That might prevent an immune response that attacks the brain. And it would mean that the parasite can't be spread from person to person by black flies. Because nodding syndrome appears to be the result of an immune response, Nath says, it may be possible to limit brain damage in some children by using drugs that tone down the immune system response. The finding also raises the possibility that parasites, or other infections, are causing epilepsy in the U.S. and other countries, Nath says. "We know there are a large number of immune-mediated epilepsies," Nath says. "But the underlying cause is not clear." And there are plenty of parasitic infections in the U.S. Pinworms, for example, infect millions of children each year. It's possible that some of these infections are leading to epilepsy, Johnson says. "We don't know because we haven't looked yet." http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/02/15/515424720/scientists-may-have-solved-the-mystery-of-nodding-syndrome

This is one of the best articles I have read summing up the medical issues wreaking havoc on our children neurologically. It also goes hand in hand with the articles posted here in regards to missing gut biomes found in Autism, (ASU article) and the good strep bacteria in the throat, (NIH article) in the prevention of strep for PANDAS families. The author also talks about Gluten and Dairy as inflammatory contributors but not necessarily from an allergic response. The article gives me so much hope that we are finding answers. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/04/17/psychoneuroimmunology-inflammation.aspx?e_cid=20140417Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20140417Z1&et_cid=DM42653&et_rid=490528222