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6A Daily News – Monday, December 12, 2011 Vitality & health LOS ANGELES (MCT) — Brody Kennedy was a typical sixth-grader who loved to hang out with friends in Castaic, Calif., and play video games. A strep-throat infection in October caused him to miss a couple of days of school, but he was eager to rejoin his classmates, recalls his mother, Tracy. Then, a week after Brody became ill, he awoke one morning to find his world was no longer safe. Paranoid about germs and obsessed with cleanli- ness, he refused to touch things and showered sever- al times a day. His fear pre- vented him from attending school, and he insisted on wearing nothing but a sheet or demanding that his mother microwave his clothes or heat them in the dryer before dressing. So began a horrific bat- tle with a sudden-onset mental illness that was diagnosed as pediatric autoimmune neuropsychi- atric disorder associated with streptococcus, or PANDAS. The puzzling name describes children who have obsessive-com- pulsive disorder that occurs suddenly — and often dramatically — with- in days or weeks of a sim- ple infection, such as strep throat. "He washed his hands over and over and was using hand-sanitizer non- stop," says Tracy Kennedy, who has home-schooled her 11-year-old son since early November. "He had never been like this before. Ever. He just woke up with it." The bizarre illness, first recognized in the mid- 1990s, has been cloaked in controversy. Now, howev- er, studies are reinforcing the belief that some psy- chiatric illnesses can be triggered by ordinary infections and the body's immune response. The the- ory remains unproved, but the research raises the pos- Childhood disorder bolsters research on infection MCT photo After a strep infection, 11-year-old Brody Kennedy, with his mother Tracy, developed a fear of germs and began signs of obsessive-compulsive dis- order with constant washing of hands and showering. sibility that some cases of mental illness might be cured by treating the immune system dysfunc- tion. "Some people get sick with whatever infection, and they recover and they're fine," says M. Karen Newell Rogers, an immunologist at Texas A&M University School of Medicine in Temple, Texas, who studies such illnesses. "Other people get sick and recover, but they are not the same." PANDAS is thought to be caused by antibodies generated as a result of an infection, usually strep. Normally, the antibodies fight the infection and pro- mote healing. But in PAN- DAS, the antibody response is thought to go awry, attacking brain cells and resulting in OCD symptoms. A greater understanding of the link between strep and OCD has opened the door to the study of other psychiatric or neurological illnesses that may be linked to improper immune response, includ- ing cases of autism, schiz- ophrenia and anorexia. "The whole area of mental illness caused by infections is being looked at more closely because of PANDAS," says Dr. Michael A. Jenike, a pro- fessor of psychiatry at Har- vard Medical School and chairman of the Interna- tional OCD Foundation's scientific advisory board. "If you can prevent life- long suffering by using antibiotics or some acute intervention, that would be huge." PANDAS is generally poorly understood in the medical field, says Dr. Margo Thienemann, a Palo Alto, Calif., child psychia- trist who has treated sever- al cases. There is no test to help doctors diagnose it, although the National Institute of Mental Health says that PANDAS can be identified after two or three episodes of OCD or tics that occur in conjunction with strep infection — a vague guideline that results in much confusion. Thienemann says patients tend to fall between the cracks of psy- chiatry and immunology. But early diagnosis is important. "In psychiatry, we gen- erally spend our time treat- ing diseases without know- ing the reason they hap- pen," she says. "With PANDAS we are able to see the cause of a problem rather than the downstream effects. This is the exciting part." James W. 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Mon & Fri 1pm-4:30pm For Emergencies, After Hours, Week-ends, Call 530-567-5001 345 Hickory St. Red Bluff Tel: (530) 529-4733 Fax: (530) 529-1114 No one knows what portion of obsessive-com- pulsive disorder cases may be tied to PANDAS _ or even how prevalent the condition may be, Jenike says. "I used to think it was exceedingly rare," he says. "Now I think it's exceed- ingly common." Recent research has strengthened support for PANDAS. For instance, one 2009 study demon- strated that in mice prone to autoimmune disorders (in which the immune sys- tem attacks healthy cells), exposure to strep led to OCD-like behavior. A 2010 Yale study found that tic symptoms worsened somewhat in children with OCD follow- ing a strep infection. That suggests some children are vulnerable to flare-ups of OCD symptoms when stressed by infections. 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