In the mid 1990’s, doctors began noticing that some children who had strep ended up showing symptoms of sudden onset mental illness after recovering from the strep infection. This has led some doctors to wonder if antibiotics could help alleviate those disorders. It is an interesting concept.
The strange situation happens something like this. A child, who has no signs or symptoms of any form of mental illness, catches a strep infection. He or she gets a case of strep throat, goes to the doctor, and is treated. The child misses a few days of school, but makes a full recovery.
In a few situations, the child doesn’t recover as expected. The child will have fought off the strep infection, but somehow has started exhibiting signs of a mental illness that he or she did not appear to have before catching strep. Suddenly, this child has developed obsessive compulsive disorder.
There is a name for this. It is called sudden-onset mental illness, and the diagnosis is described as pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcus. It is abbreviated as PANDAS. Originally, not much was known about this disorder. Since then, several studies are pointing towards the belief that some psychiatric illnesses can actually be triggered by an ordinary infection, and an unusual reaction from the child’s immune response.
Usually, when someone gets an infection, it causes their body to generate antibodies that will fight that infection. However, for some reason, in kids that develop PANDAS, the antibody response does not function as it should. Instead of attacking the virus, and promoting healing, the antibodies attack the brain cells. It is suspected that this is what causes the child to develop symptoms of OCD.
More studies need to be done in order to fully understand this apparent link between strep and OCD. Even so, the potential for that link to be as causal as is suspected brings up several other interesting theories.
Perhaps some psychiatric or neurological illness are linked to having a malfunction of the antibody response. Could antibiotics be used to reduce the OCD symptoms of kids that have PANDAS? Could it cure it?
Maybe other psychological disorders, such as anorexia, schizophrenia, or autism, could be the result of a malfunction of antibody response as well. Again, more studies need to be done in order to find out more about this potential link between strep infection and the onset of certain childhood mental disorders.
Image by Alisha Vargas on Flickr