The Globe and Mail looks at anecdotal cases, and interviews researchers about the growing interest in inflammation as a source of serious psychological distress in some individuals. The approach could lead to completely different approaches to psychiatric disorders.
“Although the research is still in its early days, there’s a growing sense of excitement over the prospect that certain individuals may regain mental health with antibiotics, intravenous immunoglobulin treatments (infusions of antibodies) and possibly dietary changes, instead of traditional psychiatric drugs and brain stimulation treatments,” reports the Globe.
“I think we’re on the cusp of something that’s really huge and truly revolutionary in the way in which we… both diagnose people, as well as to make them better,” Mady Hornig of the Columbia University Medical Center told the Globe. Hornig’s research “focuses on the role of microbes and immune factors in neuropsychiatric illness.”
Treating the brain and the immune system in tandem (The Globe and Mail, January 18, 2015)
