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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 Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:22AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:22AM (#743253) Homepage

    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).

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