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[...] 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: 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]