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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: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:44PM
There doesn't seem to be an easily google-able medical consensus on the remission rate of schizophrenia. I found a JAMA article following up on patients from the 1930s, elsewhere a bunch of word salad with no numbers, nothing useful. The very large Venn diagram of people who recover from mental illness and people who get transplants could expect an overlap containing at least one human.
Presumably the rate of complete remission is higher than the odds of having to completely replace and overhaul all existing medical understanding of the immune system and neurology; in that way one anecdote makes an interesting clickbait not so useful research.
To be a real stickler for accuracy you'd have to feed in the rate of inaccurate diagnosis. By analogy if some idiot diagnosed me as pregnant (I'm a dude...) the odds of misdiagnosis are slightly higher than the odds of the entire obstetrician medical community being wrong about where babay come from.