Relationship Between Immune System And Mental Illness. Part 1 of 3

Relationship Between Immune System And Mental Illness. In the elementary scientific illustration of exactly how some psychiatric illnesses might be linked to an immune system gone awry, researchers disclose they cured mice of an obsessive-compulsive condition known as “hair-pulling disorder” by tweaking the rodents’ immune systems. Although scientists have noticed a link between the immune system and psychiatric illnesses, this is the inception evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship, said the authors of a study appearing in the May 28 issue of the journal Cell. The “cure” in this case was a bone marrow transplant, which replaced a backward gene with a normal one.

The excitement lies in the fact that this could open the way to new treatments for different mental disorders, although bone marrow transplants, which can be life-threatening in themselves, are not a likely candidate, at least not at this point. “There are some drugs already existing that are functioning with respect to immune disorders,” said study senior author Mario Capecchi, the recipient of a 2007 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. “This is very original information in terms of there being some kind of immune reaction in the body that could be contributing to mental health symptoms,” said Jacqueline Phillips-Sabol, an assistant professor of neurosurgery and psychiatry at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and commandant of the neuropsychology division at Scott & White in Temple, Texas. “This helps us continue to unravel the mystery of mental illness, which old to be shrouded in mysticism. We didn’t know where it came from or what caused it”.

However, Phillips-Sabol was quick to point out that bone marrow transplants are not a reasonable treatment for mental health disorders. “That’s all things considered a stretch at least at this point. Most patients who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are fairly successfully treated with psychotherapy. The story starts with a mouse mutant that has a very unusual behavior, which is very almost identical to the obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder in humans called trichotillomania, when patients compulsively remove all their body hair,” explained Capecchi, who is a distinguished professor of human genetics and biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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