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Sometime around 1907, well before the modern randomized clinical trial was routine, American psychiatrist Henry Cotton began removing decaying teeth from his patients in hopes of curing their mental disorders. If that didn’t work, he moved on to more invasive excisions: tonsils, testicles, ovaries and, in some cases, colons.

 

Following his death in 1933, interest in Cotton’s cures waned. His mortality rates hovered at a troubling 45 percent, and in all likelihood his treatments didn’t work. But though his rogue surgeries were dreadfully misguided and disfiguring, a growing body of research suggests that there might be something to his belief that infection — and with it inflammation — is involved in some forms of mental illness.

 

Late last year, Turhan Canli, an associate professor of psychology and radiology at Stony Brook University, published a paper in the journal Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders asserting that depression should be thought of as an infectious disease.

The eight-year-old from Whitehead was struck with a common bacterial (streptococcal) infection last year.

 

It caused inflammation in her brain and, as a result, she was diagnosed with pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections (PANDAS) in July.

Schizophrenia could be treated with cheap, accessible anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, according to new research.

 

The study, published on Friday in the American Journal of Psychiatry, concluded that patients suffering from schizophrenia showed high levels of inflammation in their brains They also discovered that people with other markers for a heightened risk of schizophrenia were likely to have higher-than-normal inflammation levels.

 

The findings suggest that, if detected early enough through brain scans, schizophrenia could potentially be prevented or at least mitigated in at-risk patients using simple anti-inflammatory drugs.