Is PANDAS concidered an illness or disease? Cure or Control?

[3boysmom]

Is PANDAS considered an illness or disease? When you seem symptom free, are you cured or maintaining/controling the symptoms? When do you officially say (and won't these words be awesome)...he/she used to have PANDAS?

[Buster]

Well, that's kind of the debate: disease or syndrome.

 

A Syndrome is a collection of signs and symptoms known to frequently appear together but without a known cause. A disease is defined as a disorder in a system or organ that effects the body's function. Most add the requirement that the disease must also have either a recognized cause or a consistent anatomic alteration.

 

Swedo and Kirvan have a proposed cause (an anti-neuronal antibody binding to D2 receptors in the basal ganglia ). Others say that this is correlation but not causality. To show causality you have to show that every time the result occurs, the proposed cause was present and that the result does not occur without the proposed cause. This is a pretty high bar.

 

So in answer to your actual question -- we would say that PANDAS is in remission.

 

Regards,

 

Buster

 

Is PANDAS considered an illness or disease? When you seem symptom free, are you cured or maintaining/controling the symptoms? When do you officially say (and won't these words be awesome)...he/she used to have PANDAS?

[kimballot]

That is a great question

 

I don't know if I have the best answer here, but PANDAS is not officially a disease, because it is not in the International Classification of Diseases nor is it in the Diagnistic and Statistics Manual for mental health diagnoses. Therefore, Doctors cannot bill for "PANDAS" or code for "PANDAS". Is PANDAS an illness? Illness means that you are not well. It would seem that our kids are sometimes ill due to PANDAS. They are ill with tics, OCD, ADHD symptoms and such. I call PANDAS a neuroimmunological condition. I don't know if that is a real term... but it seems to fit. Once you have the condition, you are not cured of it. You can be cured of the illness, but the illness may return at a later date.

 

I am interested in seeing other people's interpretation of this.

[thereishope]

When I explain it to people, I use the word "disorder". I find words like disease or illness will scare them too much.

 

My son is currently doing well and I still say he "has" PANDAS. It may not be surfaced right now, but the opportunity for it to resurface in dormant in his body.

 

I also say PANDAS goes into "remission".

Edited April 8, 2010 by Vickie