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posted by chromas on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the have-you-tried-reinstalling? dept.

[...] 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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:05PM

    by Taibhsear (1464) on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:05PM (#742861)

    Not sure about hypnosis but psychosomatic effects are definitely real. I was doing a research project last semester that related to it. Psychological stress causes your body to release corticosterone into your body. Said biochemical has a depleting effect on CD8+ T cell populations, which are responsible for keeping some diseases in check. (my research was focused on HSV) Once those T cells are depleted the virus infected cells reactivate and breakouts occur. I can provide links to the related articles if interested.

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