Volunteers Needed: We need volunteers to reach out to their municipalities to request that they light up monuments, like the state house, bridges, monuments, etc., be lit up on October 9th,...
🌟 Join IOCDF for a Special PANS PANDAS Town Hall! 🌟 As part of PANS PANDAS Awareness Week, the IOCDF is hosting an incredible Town Hall featuring three inspiring voices:...
In late November of 2023, we noticed that our daughter, Sammi, had a limp. She had fallen and said her knee hurt. The next week, she began acting very tired...
What is the cost of not treating PANS/ PANDAS promptly & appropriately? We recently sat down with Susan Swedo, MD, to discuss a critical topic: the cost of inaction when...
California Legislative Action Please follow this page and ASPIRE’s social media for updates – Facebook and Instagram. Please contact CALPANS with questions regarding California legislative...
Bennett was a typically developing 7-year-old boy when he started second grade, the first year back to school full time after COVID-19, without masks. That December, he came down...
Hi! My name is Skylar, and I was diagnosed with PANS in October 2023 after struggling with it for around 10 years. I was 7 or 8 years old...
Therapists need to be aware of when inflammatory disorders can masquerade as psychiatric conditions Therapy Today – September, 2024 – Lucy McDonald is a counselor at the Children’s...
This is the journey of Emily, who is now 16. She began experiencing PANS symptoms in 2020 during the height of COVID-19; before that, Emily was a typical kid and did all the things that girls her age...
Tran, Michael; Amador, Alcides; and Camacho Bermudez, Sofia, “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Other Specified Anxiety Disorder in an 8-Year-Old Post-respiratory Infection: A Case Report” (2024). Research Colloquium. 91.https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/colloquium/2024/posters/91
Conclusions: This case underscores the importance of considering infectious etiologies in the differential diagnosis of sudden-onset psychiatric symptoms in pediatric patients. The positive response to Sertraline and the proposed CBT highlights the potential benefits of a combined pharmacological and therapeutic approach in managing OCD and anxiety disorders. Continued follow-up and treatment adaptation is essential to ensure sustained improvement and quality of life for pediatric patients with similar presentations.
Pol-Fuster J., Fernández de la Cruz L., Beucke J., Hesselmark E., Crowley J.J., de Schipper E., Brikell I., Chang Z., D’Onofrio B.M., Larsson H., Lichtenstein P., Kuja-Halkola, R. & Mataix-Cols D., A population-based multigenerational family co-aggregation study of severe infections and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Biological Psychiatry (2024), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.biopsych.2024.09.004.
This large population-based study in Sweden investigated the potential link between severe infections and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) through a familial co-aggregation approach. By analyzing data from over 4.9 million individuals born between 1960 and 2008, researchers explored the risk of OCD among relatives of those with severe infections, spanning varying degrees of genetic relatedness. The study found that the risk of OCD increased with closer genetic ties, with monozygotic twins showing the highest correlation. A dose-response relationship between the number of infections and the odds of OCD was also identified. These findings remained robust even after adjusting for comorbid autoimmune disorders and infections in relatives. The results suggest that genetic factors play a significant role in the observed association, pointing to shared genetic susceptibilities between infections and OCD. This supports the idea that genetic pleiotropy—where the same genes influence multiple traits—may contribute to both infection susceptibility and OCD risk. The study highlights the importance of considering both genetic and environmental factors in understanding OCD development.