OCD caused by other infection besides Strep

[kakrpa]

My daughter is 14 and she has high level of mycoplasma. Her main issue is obsessive thoughts and it is horrible. Yesterday morning she felt great. She got up early and said her head was so clear. She was happy and herself. By noon she wanted someone to kill her. We have been off antibiotics since mid January and things have been getting worse. We just feel we can't keep putting antibiotics in her. This is an autoimmune disease and I believe it starts in the gut. We are using the book " The Microbiome Solution" to heal our leaky gut. We are also about to embark on a serious essential oil program. It will be 2 years in April that this happened to us and it was just in September that we found out that is was PANS. We too are struggling in school. I am not sure she will be able to finish this year. She can't focus and doing homework, well let's just say it rarely happens lately.

 

I'm so sorry to hear this - how about a low dose abx until you get ramped up on alternative methods and see what works? So sad to hear of her suffering like this. I can understand it completely - I too have severe anxiety/pure OCD (intrusive thoughts) that can make life insufferable.

 

Out of curiosity, what kind of abx has she been on that seemed to help her? There's recent research that suggests minocycline may be a good abx to try for those also suffering OCD as it somewhat helps modulate glutamate.

 

Keep us posted!

[Wombat140]

 

@ MyLighthouse and @ Johnsmom.

 

I totally agree with LLM and momma2alex. I would investigate bartonella infection if psychiatric issues are involved.

I don't understand - what do you mean by "psychiatric issues"? As opposed to what? I suppose tics are counted as "neurological" rather than "psychiatric", but "psychiatric" just means mental problems, so OCD is "psychiatric". Did you mean things like OCD, or did you mean something else?

[Ladymavs]

My daughter is 14 and she has high level of mycoplasma. Her main issue is obsessive thoughts and it is horrible. Yesterday morning she felt great. She got up early and said her head was so clear. She was happy and herself. By noon she wanted someone to kill her. We have been off antibiotics since mid January and things have been getting worse. We just feel we can't keep putting antibiotics in her. This is an autoimmune disease and I believe it starts in the gut. We are using the book " The Microbiome Solution" to heal our leaky gut. We are also about to embark on a serious essential oil program. It will be 2 years in April that this happened to us and it was just in September that we found out that is was PANS. We too are struggling in school. I am not sure she will be able to finish this year. She can't focus and doing homework, well let's just say it rarely happens lately.

Definitely keep us posted as my DS 14 has high myco p (igg) and the main issue over the past 2.5 years has been intrusive thoughts, which have been mostly of a religious scrupulosity variety over the past several months. When we first started on ABX back in 2014, he seemed to get pretty fast relief from azith and we stayed on for 1-2 months and came off...only using when he had flares. This past flare starting in February, we had asked to switch up abx and started biaxin....which has brought zero positive results thus far. I do agree with you on the gut health and we do probiotics daily whether we are on abx or not, along with omegas. We also use Vitamin C/D for immunity. Good luck to you....let me know about the oils as we are about to start on some of these as well.

[wisdom_seeker]

I agree with what's been posted -- our son's flares are from any infection and, I've come to realize lately, also from severe emotional stress overload.

 

Turns out that the sympathetic nervous system and immune system are intimately linked, and -- just as infections have effects on mood, the fight-flight response can trigger an increased inflammatory response. It's not a simple effect (see this nice review) and I don't know enough yet to know which inflammations also cause a break in the blood-brain barrier, but just as @MomwithOCDson discovered, keeping the anxiety lower helps avoid the negative feedback loop.

 

So definitely follow up on the possible infections described above, but also pay attention to whether things like allergies, GI inflammation, or extended emotional overload might contribute to triggering a flare of his Colitis symptoms -- either along with or before the PANS symptoms-- or simply making an exacerbation worse.

 

That feedback loop between anxiety and inflammation (and thus also autoimmunity) just stinks, IMHO. We all have to stress the kid with ordinary life, and stretch the boundaries of "can't" in order to minimize the impact of each flare. For my son the worst triggers are being criticized, blamed, not believed, being pushed to go into school when he had school panic, or interrupted and told by DH that he needs to switch from something he's in the middle of (OCD worry that he'll forget). So if that's an issue for you, what's helped me is to work really hard to understand him, accept, and thus develop a healing partnership so that we can ration the stresses, try to have fun, and I can help repair the damage from painful/overwhelming events (whether caused by me, DH, or a blood draw.)

 

@Rowingmom, thanks for having such a detailed signature.

It gives me ideas for things to try, and hope for the future. That your DD no longer flares with infections is so comforting to read!!!

I'll look for some of your other posts to see how/why you decided to add the gf/cf diet to the herbs, as well as to minimize EMF exposure .... plus the other things that helped you get to 90%.