[...] Years later, "he is completely off all medication and shows no psychiatric symptoms," Dr. Miyaoka told me in an email. Somehow the transplant cured the man's schizophrenia.
A bone-marrow transplant essentially reboots the immune system. Chemotherapy kills off your old white blood cells, and new ones sprout from the donor's transplanted blood stem cells. It's unwise to extrapolate too much from a single case study, and it's possible it was the drugs the man took as part of the transplant procedure that helped him. But his recovery suggests that his immune system was somehow driving his psychiatric symptoms.
At first glance, the idea seems bizarre — what does the immune system have to do with the brain? — but it jibes with a growing body of literature suggesting that the immune system is involved in psychiatric disorders from depression to bipolar disorder.
He Got Schizophrenia. He Got Cancer. And Then He Got Cured.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:59AM (4 children)
The rest of TFA goes over multiple psych conditions that seem to react to immunosupressants or disease.
Having a Schizophrenic family member, I welcome any idea that doesn't require near-incapacitating drugs for treatment.
Like for the cancer news earlier, yay for scientific progress. We might live long enough to just die of being old.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:23AM (1 child)
Drugs that wipe out the toxoplasmosis organism sometimes help.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 02 2018, @09:06AM
The parent refers to the the corellation between having had cats as a child and schizophrenia as an adult
This has been known since the fifties
The parasite makes mice less fearful of cats, but it's not yet clear that it really causes schizophrenia in humans
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @03:51PM
what i would prescribe is strict regulation of diet and feeding times. like only eating between 10am and 6pm. wake during the day. sleep at night. ketogenic foods and vegetables only. limited sugar only from fruit. nothing stronger than green tea as far as caffeine goes. 15min + per day of sunlight to the skin. exercise or sauna every day or as much as possible. if you are able to get that far, maybe look into more aggressive fasting.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:22AM
One shrink achieved a 90% cure of his bipolar patients by putting them on T3 (thyroid). Indicating the real problem was Hashimoto's thyroiditis, since adding T3 stops the up-and-down thyroid cycling typical of the late-failure stage. Hashi is an auto-immune disorder, so can respond to factors that affect general immune response. (Such as being initially triggered by an unrelated infection.) Same principle. Fact is the brain is very much tied to the hormone system, which is subject to all manner of influences and feedbacks, so it can be useful to do a complete hormone workup (thyroid, reproductive, cortisol).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.