Bob
13th April 2019, 22:28
Have you ever been subjected to a toxic environment, ingested foods that you knew were toxic, or didn't feel right, or subjected to polluted/contaminated water so laden with chlorine or fluorine or other substance that your skin just crawled?
How about noises and odors which were totally unfamiliar to you, or electronic pollutions from random machines chinking 24/7 in the day and night - where the aroma of toxins from various alcohols, from rug cleaners, from fluorescent lights were blaring at you?
Did you feel comfortable or were you going sick, trying to escape?
Did you feel you were loosing your mind? Did you briefly have outbursts pointing fingers at everything and everyone trying to cope with the "attacks" that you very rightly are feeling?
Well.. consider a hypersensitive allergy reaction really was happening, and no, you are not going crazy, and no people are not attacking you behind your back or to your face..
You have exhibited a very severe form of hyper allergy - here is a case below describing this in action and how very very radical and scarey it was for everyone in the experience..
So before you jump off the cliff so to speak, take a very deep breath and consider the below (PS I bet some of you took antihistamines to deal with a hyper-reactive immune system...)
IF THIS has happened recently to you, just take a deep breath and let's look at a sever allergy reaction and not jump off the cliff so to speak.. Touching the REAL issues behind the trauma really can show it is related to a toxic auto-immune system reaction.
Trust me on this one - I have had hyper-allergic responses to just the same situations, and one can get through it.. Sometimes it does require getting any viruses out of one's system too that one may have picked up besides a "toxic" environmental exposure..
One step at a time, OK ?? Please??
-------------------------
from: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2014fall/brain-attack.html - Stanford Medicine 2014
An explanation for a mental illness that strikes out of the blue
On March 2, 2009, something snapped inside Paul Michael Nelson. In the middle of the night, his parents found the 7-year-old boy stabbing the door of the family’s home office with a kitchen knife, trying to get at a computer that was off-limits after his bedtime.
When they stopped him, he flopped around the floor on his knees, barking like a dog. He tore at blankets with his teeth and spoke in gibberish.
It was Paul Michael’s first episode of psychosis.
“It was like he was demon-possessed,” says Mary Nelson, his mother.
The Nelsons rushed to their local emergency room, where staff didn’t seem to believe their account of the intensity of the outburst and said it must have been just a temper tantrum. The staff wrote a referral to a psychiatrist and sent him home.
The next day, the Nelsons took Paul Michael to the psychiatrist.
She was about to give him an antipsychotic, but changed her mind after reading his blood work.
“She said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s got low platelets; I can’t prescribe this,’ and she shuffled us out,” says Paul Nelson, the boy’s father. Paul Michael’s levels of platelets, the blood cells that form clots to stop bleeding, were far below normal, but the Nelsons were not sure why the psychiatrist thought this justified avoiding antipsychotics.
After the family left the psychiatrist’s office, Paul saw his son, who seemed to have held himself together for the doctor, becoming overwhelmed.
“He’s very scared; he knows something’s wrong. When she shut the door, it felt like the doctor shut us off.” When the family got home that day, Paul Michael exploded into another psychotic fury.
Sucked into the whirlpool of Paul Michael’s compulsions, rages and delusions, neither the Nelsons nor the doctors who took on Paul Michael’s case realized that the little boy’s abnormal blood work held an important clue to what was wrong.
Your immune system can make you crazy.
When the immune system gets derailed from its usual infection-fighting role and attacks the brain, it can trigger obsessive-compulsive actions, anorexia-like refusal to eat, severe anxiety, violent outbursts and other symptoms of mental illness, as well as a host of neurological problems — in the worst cases, seizures, respiratory failure and death.
Although doctors recognize a handful of immune-mediated neurologic diseases in children and adults, their awareness of the immune connection to mental illness is limited.
That’s slowly changing. Instead of hot-potatoing such puzzling cases out of their offices, as the Nelsons’ first psychiatrist did, some physicians are working to understand the mechanisms and develop treatments for autoimmune diseases that attack not just the brain but also the patient’s personality, the intangible spark we call the self.
It’s not easy.
There’s no diagnostic lab test for pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, or PANS — the name for this list of devastating symptoms — and the list probably encompasses an array of similar but not identical brain diseases, most of which still have unknown causes.
But in spite of the stumbling blocks and the scientific disputes they’ve engendered, answers are emerging, in large part because of a Stanford team’s efforts to conduct research and treat affected children in the country’s first clinic to address the disease.
Paul Michael’s second breakdown happened after his family returned home from that unsuccessful psychiatrist visit, March 3. It was so violent that his parents called the police. He was doing some of the same alarming things as the night before — flopping around, speaking in gibberish — but was also tearing up his room, causing his parents to worry that he might find an object there that he could use to hurt himself.
Paul tried holding the little boy to calm him, but Paul Michael fought his dad with what seemed like superhuman strength.
The police took him to the hospital on a 5150, California’s code for involuntary restraint of persons who are a danger to themselves or others. He was in and out of a pediatric psychiatric hospital for several months.
Meanwhile Paul and Mary began their search for answers, starting with Paul Michael’s general pediatrician and the psychiatrists, social workers and counselors they found through their health insurance provider and the psychiatric hospital where Paul Michael stayed.
Most of these caregivers ascribed Paul Michael’s problems to a family history of psychiatric illness (both parents had depression and bipolar disorder in their extended families), poor parenting or outright child abuse.
The Nelsons were willing to try anything to become better parents. “If I’m doing something wrong, I want to know,” Mary says, adding that “We felt like, we’ve somehow got to try to survive because we love him so much.”
But they were grieved and confused, too: “We met with counselors at the psychiatric hospital who were saying things like, ‘Mom, you’re too codependent’ — and I might be, but I knew I didn’t cause my kid to go psychotic.”
Paul ticks off the strategies they tried, following counselors’ suggestions, to improve their family environment: rewards for good behavior, lists of skills to utilize, contracts, daily affirmations … until both parents chuckle ruefully at the futility of those efforts in the face of Paul Michael’s uncontrollable compulsions and rages.
Although the suggestion that they were abusing their son pained them, they knew why it crossed people’s minds: He was always covered in bruises. More than once, the police showed up to a scene of one parent restraining an explosive Paul Michael, and, to an outside observer, it was hard to tell what was really going on.
Paul had been a San Francisco sheriff’s deputy for 27 years before retiring to return to school, so he could easily see these scenes from the officers’ perspective. There were times he found himself consoling the officers because they had never seen a young child so distressed.
At first, the only dissenting medical expert’s voice about the origins of Paul Michael’s illness came from Mary’s colleague William Benitz, MD, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, where Mary was a human resources manager in the neonatology division.
Benitz urged the Nelsons to take Paul Michael to a rheumatologist who could investigate whether an autoimmune disease could be causing both their son’s very low platelet count — which could explain his constant bruising — and his sudden psychiatric symptoms.
“I have a rule of thumb for pediatric patients: They’re only allowed to have one disease at a time,” Benitz says. “It’s not 100 percent true, but for a previously healthy 7-year-old to develop what appeared to be psychiatric and hematologic symptoms from two different, independent processes didn’t make sense. There had to be a unifying diagnosis.”
Then, the Nelsons ended up at Stanford Hospital’s emergency department during one of Paul Michael’s outbursts, where they saw Richard Shaw, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.
Observing Paul Michael’s behavior, Shaw told the Nelsons that they weren’t dealing with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; instead, he suspected vasculitis or brain inflammation. His opinion spurred the family to keep searching for a diagnosis.
Paul saw his son, who seemed to have held himself together for the doctor, becoming overwhelmed. “He’s very scared; he knows something’s wrong."
A history of controversy
When Paul Michael became sick in 2009, the concept of autoimmune psychiatric disease was barely on doctors’ radar. It wasn’t until September 2012 that Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford opened the country’s first clinic devoted to treating children with PANS, which is still the only clinic to couple the expertise of psychiatry and immunology/rheumatology for these patients.
Children who meet diagnostic criteria for PANS have sudden, severe obsessive-compulsive behavior or anorexia, along with so many other problems that the child can barely function.
These may include separation anxiety so powerful the child cannot bear to be more than a few feet from a parent, bizarre inhibitions about food, deterioration in schoolwork, intense insomnia or, as the Nelsons observed in Paul Michael, violent rages when the child’s obsessions cannot be satisfied.
“In some ways, it’s like having your kid suddenly become an Alzheimer’s patient, or like having your child revert back to being a toddler,” says Jennifer Frankovich, MD, clinical assistant professor of pediatric rheumatology at the School of Medicine and one of the clinic’s founders.
“We can’t say how many kids with psychiatric symptoms have an underlying immune or inflammatory component to their disorder, but given the burgeoning research indicating that inflammation drives mood disorders and other psychiatric problems, it’s likely to be a large subset of children and even adults diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses,” says Kiki Chang, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
Chang, a pediatric bipolar expert, was drawn to collaborate with Frankovich in founding Stanford’s clinic because many PANS patients are first suspected of having bipolar disorder. But although their symptoms begin as abruptly as bipolar manias, they are not manic.
Talking about these mystifying children (among them Paul Michael, whom the doctors now consider their first PANS case), Chang and Frankovich realized the only thing that was clear was that the children and their families desperately needed help. Nearly everything else about PANS was up for debate. “A lot of academic physicians have said ‘This does not exist; it’s just bad behavior, and there are a lot of reasons for kids to have bad behavior,’” Frankovich says.
For many years, controversy dogged PANDAS, the provisional diagnosis that preceded PANS in the medical literature. The phenomenon, which was first reported in the 1980s by Susan Swedo, MD, now a senior investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health, included sudden emergence of OCD or tics (repetitive, hard-to-control vocal or physical movements) in the wake of strep infection.
Swedo’s theory was that the body’s response to infection went awry and triggered an autoimmune attack on the brain. She succeeded in treating some cases with either long courses of antibiotics to kill strep bacteria or, if that didn’t work, various immune therapies.
However, many healthy children carry strep bacteria, one of several factors about the biology of strep that have made it difficult to clarify the bacterium’s role in the disease. So the syndrome’s critics have contended that the kids simply had run-of-the-mill Tourette’s or obsessive-compulsive disorder plus, perhaps, some behavioral problems caused by bad parenting.
The treatments Swedo proposed have risks. One of them, long-term antibiotic therapy, can favor development of antibiotic-resistant organisms. Another, treatment with immunosuppressants, puts kids at risk for serious infections. But the children’s symptoms were extremely debilitating, and the treatments seemed to help. Swedo was frustrated that, in her view, the science was being stalled by critics’ dismissal of the immune-system connection.
Frankovich and Chang acknowledge the dearth of science to explain most cases of PANS, but say that’s why Stanford’s clinic is so important: It provides a critical mass of patients for answering scientific questions. Other institutions, such as Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of South Florida in Tampa, have joined Stanford in committing resources to study and treat the disease, and more programs are under development.
“Maybe we’ll go back and say, ‘We were wrong; it’s all parenting,’” Frankovich says, sounding simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and strained. “But we have to try.”
A discovery that changed minds
The 2007 discovery of a molecular explanation for some cases of autoimmune encephalitis — a specific form of brain inflammation caused by an immune attack — has made a big difference in convincing physicians to look for autoimmune underpinnings when patients suddenly seem to go off the deep end.
In this disease, known as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, an antibody made by the patient’s immune system attacks a receptor for a single neurotransmitter, N-methyl-D-aspartate, producing psychiatric and neurologic disturbances.
For instance, a patient may first show anxiety, paranoia and hallucinations, progressing to movement disorders and seizures. In the worst cases, patients develop irregular heartbeat and breathing, go into a coma and die. But quick diagnosis and treatment can reverse all of this.
The book Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s 2012 best-seller describing her bout with the disease, raised awareness.
Though at the height of her illness, Cahalan was severely debilitated with paranoia, hallucinations, seizures and cognitive impairment, she received treatment, made a full recovery, returned to her job as a New York Post reporter and became an advocate for other autoimmune encephalitis patients.
How about noises and odors which were totally unfamiliar to you, or electronic pollutions from random machines chinking 24/7 in the day and night - where the aroma of toxins from various alcohols, from rug cleaners, from fluorescent lights were blaring at you?
Did you feel comfortable or were you going sick, trying to escape?
Did you feel you were loosing your mind? Did you briefly have outbursts pointing fingers at everything and everyone trying to cope with the "attacks" that you very rightly are feeling?
Well.. consider a hypersensitive allergy reaction really was happening, and no, you are not going crazy, and no people are not attacking you behind your back or to your face..
You have exhibited a very severe form of hyper allergy - here is a case below describing this in action and how very very radical and scarey it was for everyone in the experience..
So before you jump off the cliff so to speak, take a very deep breath and consider the below (PS I bet some of you took antihistamines to deal with a hyper-reactive immune system...)
IF THIS has happened recently to you, just take a deep breath and let's look at a sever allergy reaction and not jump off the cliff so to speak.. Touching the REAL issues behind the trauma really can show it is related to a toxic auto-immune system reaction.
Trust me on this one - I have had hyper-allergic responses to just the same situations, and one can get through it.. Sometimes it does require getting any viruses out of one's system too that one may have picked up besides a "toxic" environmental exposure..
One step at a time, OK ?? Please??
-------------------------
from: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2014fall/brain-attack.html - Stanford Medicine 2014
An explanation for a mental illness that strikes out of the blue
On March 2, 2009, something snapped inside Paul Michael Nelson. In the middle of the night, his parents found the 7-year-old boy stabbing the door of the family’s home office with a kitchen knife, trying to get at a computer that was off-limits after his bedtime.
When they stopped him, he flopped around the floor on his knees, barking like a dog. He tore at blankets with his teeth and spoke in gibberish.
It was Paul Michael’s first episode of psychosis.
“It was like he was demon-possessed,” says Mary Nelson, his mother.
The Nelsons rushed to their local emergency room, where staff didn’t seem to believe their account of the intensity of the outburst and said it must have been just a temper tantrum. The staff wrote a referral to a psychiatrist and sent him home.
The next day, the Nelsons took Paul Michael to the psychiatrist.
She was about to give him an antipsychotic, but changed her mind after reading his blood work.
“She said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s got low platelets; I can’t prescribe this,’ and she shuffled us out,” says Paul Nelson, the boy’s father. Paul Michael’s levels of platelets, the blood cells that form clots to stop bleeding, were far below normal, but the Nelsons were not sure why the psychiatrist thought this justified avoiding antipsychotics.
After the family left the psychiatrist’s office, Paul saw his son, who seemed to have held himself together for the doctor, becoming overwhelmed.
“He’s very scared; he knows something’s wrong. When she shut the door, it felt like the doctor shut us off.” When the family got home that day, Paul Michael exploded into another psychotic fury.
Sucked into the whirlpool of Paul Michael’s compulsions, rages and delusions, neither the Nelsons nor the doctors who took on Paul Michael’s case realized that the little boy’s abnormal blood work held an important clue to what was wrong.
Your immune system can make you crazy.
When the immune system gets derailed from its usual infection-fighting role and attacks the brain, it can trigger obsessive-compulsive actions, anorexia-like refusal to eat, severe anxiety, violent outbursts and other symptoms of mental illness, as well as a host of neurological problems — in the worst cases, seizures, respiratory failure and death.
Although doctors recognize a handful of immune-mediated neurologic diseases in children and adults, their awareness of the immune connection to mental illness is limited.
That’s slowly changing. Instead of hot-potatoing such puzzling cases out of their offices, as the Nelsons’ first psychiatrist did, some physicians are working to understand the mechanisms and develop treatments for autoimmune diseases that attack not just the brain but also the patient’s personality, the intangible spark we call the self.
It’s not easy.
There’s no diagnostic lab test for pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, or PANS — the name for this list of devastating symptoms — and the list probably encompasses an array of similar but not identical brain diseases, most of which still have unknown causes.
But in spite of the stumbling blocks and the scientific disputes they’ve engendered, answers are emerging, in large part because of a Stanford team’s efforts to conduct research and treat affected children in the country’s first clinic to address the disease.
Paul Michael’s second breakdown happened after his family returned home from that unsuccessful psychiatrist visit, March 3. It was so violent that his parents called the police. He was doing some of the same alarming things as the night before — flopping around, speaking in gibberish — but was also tearing up his room, causing his parents to worry that he might find an object there that he could use to hurt himself.
Paul tried holding the little boy to calm him, but Paul Michael fought his dad with what seemed like superhuman strength.
The police took him to the hospital on a 5150, California’s code for involuntary restraint of persons who are a danger to themselves or others. He was in and out of a pediatric psychiatric hospital for several months.
Meanwhile Paul and Mary began their search for answers, starting with Paul Michael’s general pediatrician and the psychiatrists, social workers and counselors they found through their health insurance provider and the psychiatric hospital where Paul Michael stayed.
Most of these caregivers ascribed Paul Michael’s problems to a family history of psychiatric illness (both parents had depression and bipolar disorder in their extended families), poor parenting or outright child abuse.
The Nelsons were willing to try anything to become better parents. “If I’m doing something wrong, I want to know,” Mary says, adding that “We felt like, we’ve somehow got to try to survive because we love him so much.”
But they were grieved and confused, too: “We met with counselors at the psychiatric hospital who were saying things like, ‘Mom, you’re too codependent’ — and I might be, but I knew I didn’t cause my kid to go psychotic.”
Paul ticks off the strategies they tried, following counselors’ suggestions, to improve their family environment: rewards for good behavior, lists of skills to utilize, contracts, daily affirmations … until both parents chuckle ruefully at the futility of those efforts in the face of Paul Michael’s uncontrollable compulsions and rages.
Although the suggestion that they were abusing their son pained them, they knew why it crossed people’s minds: He was always covered in bruises. More than once, the police showed up to a scene of one parent restraining an explosive Paul Michael, and, to an outside observer, it was hard to tell what was really going on.
Paul had been a San Francisco sheriff’s deputy for 27 years before retiring to return to school, so he could easily see these scenes from the officers’ perspective. There were times he found himself consoling the officers because they had never seen a young child so distressed.
At first, the only dissenting medical expert’s voice about the origins of Paul Michael’s illness came from Mary’s colleague William Benitz, MD, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, where Mary was a human resources manager in the neonatology division.
Benitz urged the Nelsons to take Paul Michael to a rheumatologist who could investigate whether an autoimmune disease could be causing both their son’s very low platelet count — which could explain his constant bruising — and his sudden psychiatric symptoms.
“I have a rule of thumb for pediatric patients: They’re only allowed to have one disease at a time,” Benitz says. “It’s not 100 percent true, but for a previously healthy 7-year-old to develop what appeared to be psychiatric and hematologic symptoms from two different, independent processes didn’t make sense. There had to be a unifying diagnosis.”
Then, the Nelsons ended up at Stanford Hospital’s emergency department during one of Paul Michael’s outbursts, where they saw Richard Shaw, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.
Observing Paul Michael’s behavior, Shaw told the Nelsons that they weren’t dealing with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; instead, he suspected vasculitis or brain inflammation. His opinion spurred the family to keep searching for a diagnosis.
Paul saw his son, who seemed to have held himself together for the doctor, becoming overwhelmed. “He’s very scared; he knows something’s wrong."
A history of controversy
When Paul Michael became sick in 2009, the concept of autoimmune psychiatric disease was barely on doctors’ radar. It wasn’t until September 2012 that Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford opened the country’s first clinic devoted to treating children with PANS, which is still the only clinic to couple the expertise of psychiatry and immunology/rheumatology for these patients.
Children who meet diagnostic criteria for PANS have sudden, severe obsessive-compulsive behavior or anorexia, along with so many other problems that the child can barely function.
These may include separation anxiety so powerful the child cannot bear to be more than a few feet from a parent, bizarre inhibitions about food, deterioration in schoolwork, intense insomnia or, as the Nelsons observed in Paul Michael, violent rages when the child’s obsessions cannot be satisfied.
“In some ways, it’s like having your kid suddenly become an Alzheimer’s patient, or like having your child revert back to being a toddler,” says Jennifer Frankovich, MD, clinical assistant professor of pediatric rheumatology at the School of Medicine and one of the clinic’s founders.
“We can’t say how many kids with psychiatric symptoms have an underlying immune or inflammatory component to their disorder, but given the burgeoning research indicating that inflammation drives mood disorders and other psychiatric problems, it’s likely to be a large subset of children and even adults diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses,” says Kiki Chang, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
Chang, a pediatric bipolar expert, was drawn to collaborate with Frankovich in founding Stanford’s clinic because many PANS patients are first suspected of having bipolar disorder. But although their symptoms begin as abruptly as bipolar manias, they are not manic.
Talking about these mystifying children (among them Paul Michael, whom the doctors now consider their first PANS case), Chang and Frankovich realized the only thing that was clear was that the children and their families desperately needed help. Nearly everything else about PANS was up for debate. “A lot of academic physicians have said ‘This does not exist; it’s just bad behavior, and there are a lot of reasons for kids to have bad behavior,’” Frankovich says.
For many years, controversy dogged PANDAS, the provisional diagnosis that preceded PANS in the medical literature. The phenomenon, which was first reported in the 1980s by Susan Swedo, MD, now a senior investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health, included sudden emergence of OCD or tics (repetitive, hard-to-control vocal or physical movements) in the wake of strep infection.
Swedo’s theory was that the body’s response to infection went awry and triggered an autoimmune attack on the brain. She succeeded in treating some cases with either long courses of antibiotics to kill strep bacteria or, if that didn’t work, various immune therapies.
However, many healthy children carry strep bacteria, one of several factors about the biology of strep that have made it difficult to clarify the bacterium’s role in the disease. So the syndrome’s critics have contended that the kids simply had run-of-the-mill Tourette’s or obsessive-compulsive disorder plus, perhaps, some behavioral problems caused by bad parenting.
The treatments Swedo proposed have risks. One of them, long-term antibiotic therapy, can favor development of antibiotic-resistant organisms. Another, treatment with immunosuppressants, puts kids at risk for serious infections. But the children’s symptoms were extremely debilitating, and the treatments seemed to help. Swedo was frustrated that, in her view, the science was being stalled by critics’ dismissal of the immune-system connection.
Frankovich and Chang acknowledge the dearth of science to explain most cases of PANS, but say that’s why Stanford’s clinic is so important: It provides a critical mass of patients for answering scientific questions. Other institutions, such as Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of South Florida in Tampa, have joined Stanford in committing resources to study and treat the disease, and more programs are under development.
“Maybe we’ll go back and say, ‘We were wrong; it’s all parenting,’” Frankovich says, sounding simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and strained. “But we have to try.”
A discovery that changed minds
The 2007 discovery of a molecular explanation for some cases of autoimmune encephalitis — a specific form of brain inflammation caused by an immune attack — has made a big difference in convincing physicians to look for autoimmune underpinnings when patients suddenly seem to go off the deep end.
In this disease, known as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, an antibody made by the patient’s immune system attacks a receptor for a single neurotransmitter, N-methyl-D-aspartate, producing psychiatric and neurologic disturbances.
For instance, a patient may first show anxiety, paranoia and hallucinations, progressing to movement disorders and seizures. In the worst cases, patients develop irregular heartbeat and breathing, go into a coma and die. But quick diagnosis and treatment can reverse all of this.
The book Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s 2012 best-seller describing her bout with the disease, raised awareness.
Though at the height of her illness, Cahalan was severely debilitated with paranoia, hallucinations, seizures and cognitive impairment, she received treatment, made a full recovery, returned to her job as a New York Post reporter and became an advocate for other autoimmune encephalitis patients.