a couple new articles

[jan251]

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-mayo-clinic-unravels-mystery-disease.html

 

Some patients have a fever shortly before the onset of their illness, so it's thought that perhaps they had an infection that set off the immune system, Britton said.

Not Widseth. The mystery deepened.

"I would say at least half the people I've seen don't have an obvious trigger that we can pinpoint," Britton said. "So we don't know right now what sets it off."

Dr. Sean Pittock set up the nation's first autoimmune neurology clinic at Mayo in 2006, and he now directs the Neuroimmunology Laboratory and the Center for MS and Autoimmune Neurology. He said technological advances in the past decade have led to "an explosion" in the identification of antibodies that trigger neurological disorders.

Autoimmune responses have been identified as the cause behind a variety of diseases, including dementia, epilepsy, encephalopathy and some eye diseases and movement disorders, Pittock said.

Some forms can even mimic psychiatric disorders, such as a potentially lethal one with the unwieldy name anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Susannah Cahalan, a reporter with the New York Post, brought attention to the disease in her bestselling memoir, "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness," which is being made into a movie.

 

 

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-antibodies-brain-proteins-trigger-psychosis.html

 

"The data from this study suggests that better interventions are possible, providing hope that major disability can be prevented for the subset of children experiencing acute psychosis with antibodies," Brilot added. "These findings also contribute significantly to an emerging acceptance in the field of the involvement of autoimmune antibodies in neurological diseases. Combined, these investigations are providing a better understanding of the biology of psychiatric and neurological diseases, as well as pointing to novel treatment approaches for children with these debilitating illnesses."

 

 

I didn't notice any mention of PANS/PANDAS... (makes me want to say, "duh")