Could Depression be Caused by an Infection? – NPR
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.
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Just Months Ago, Leah Was a Happy, Healthy Girl – Belfast Telegraph
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.
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Schizophrenia Linked to Infection in the Brain – Newsweek
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.
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Sharing A Son’s PANDAS Story for Awareness – Fox2 Detroit
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CLAWSON, Mich. (WJBK) – A mother is sharing her family’s story after he son was diagnosed with PANDAS in hopes that it can bring answers to other families.
“Few doctors can actually recognize it, even fewer can diagnose it and very few can actually treat it properly,” says Denise Lamfear. Her son Raymond is healthy and back in school in the third grade now, but they weren’t always sure that’s the way things would be.
Training by Repetition Actually Prevents Learning for Those with Autism – Carnegie Mellon University
Read the full story hereIndividuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) sometimes acquire a new behavior or skill only in a specific context, but they have difficulty transferring that learned skill or information to a new context.
For example, children with autism can be taught what a dog is by showing them a picture of a dog and repeating the word “dog” over and over. But, when they are then taught what a cat is or even shown another type of dog, the previous knowledge does not transfer, and they have to learn this information from scratch.
A new study published in Nature Neuroscience shows that training individuals with ASD to acquire new information by repeating the information actually harms their ability to apply that learned knowledge to other situations. This finding, by an international research team, challenges the popular educational approaches designed for ASD individuals that focus on repetition and drills.
How A Strep Infection Burns This Boy’s Brain – The Star Phoenix
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On Feb. 9, 2013, six-year-old Josiah Orr was suddenly a different person than he’d been the day before.
“He woke up and he was pretty much crazy,” said his mother Melissa.
In a video taken a few days later, the boy is inconsolable, wriggling in her arms, and saying “sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry” over and over again.
Obsessive handwashing became the other big problem. Josiah thought he was always dirty and germs were everywhere – one day he washed his hands 10 times, with 18 squirts of soap each, until his hands were dripping blood.