Hi there,
Here is an interesting article,
Best,
Sheila
http://www.msnbc.com/news/997153.asp
Diseases of the Mind
Bacteria, viruses and parasites may cause mental illnesses like
depression and perhaps even autism and anorexia
By Janet Ginsburg
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Dec. 1 issue - Olga Skipko has had the good fortune to live most of
her adult life in the Polish village of Gruszki, in the heart of the Puszcza
Bialowieska, one of Europe's most beautiful forests and home to wolves,
lynxes and the endangered European bison. Unfortunately, the forest is also
a breeding ground for disease-carrying ticks. Skipko, 49, thinks she was
bitten about 10 years ago, when she began having the classic symptoms of
Lyme borreliosis, a tickborne nervous-system disease: headaches and aching
joints. She didn't get treatment until 1998. "I was treated with antibiotics
and felt a bit better," she says
THAT WAS only the beginning of her troubles. A few years later,
she began to forget things and her speaking grew labored. It got so bad that
she had to quit her job in a nursery forest and check herself in to a
psychiatric clinic. "I hope they will help me," she says. "I promised my
children that when I come back home, I will be able to do my favorite
crosswords again." Doctors ran a battery of tests and concluded that her
mental problems were the advanced stage of the Lyme disease she had
contracted years ago.
Scientists have long known that some diseases can cause
behavioral problems. When penicillin was first used to treat syphilis,
thousands of cured schizophrenics were released from mental asylums. Now,
however, scientists have evidence that infections may play a far bigger role
in mental illness than previously thought. They've linked cases of
obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to a
variety of infectious agents, and they're investigating autism, Tourette's
and anorexia as well. They're beginning to suspect that bad bugs may cause a
great many other mental disorders, too. "The irony is that people talked
about syphilis as the 'great imitator'," says University of Louisville
biologist Paul Ewald, "but it may be the 'great illustrator'-a model for
understanding the causes of chronic diseases."
Mental illnesses constitute a large and growing portion of the
world's health problems. According to the World Health Organization,
depression is one of the most debilitating of diseases, on a par with
paraplegia. Psychiatric illnesses make up more than 10 percent of the world'
s "disease burden" (a measure of how debilitating a disease is), and are
expected to increase to 15 percent by 2020. Much of this may be the work of
viruses, bacteria and parasites. Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, of the
Stanley Medical Research Institute in Maryland, has found from studying
historical asylum records that hot spots-higher-than-normal incidences-of
mental illness can shift, much like infectious-disease outbreaks, which
lends credence to the notion that infectious agents play a big role. "Mental
disorders are the major chronic recurrent disorders of youth in all
developed countries," says Harvard policy expert Ronald Kessler, who directs
the WHO's mental-health surveys.
Perhaps the most well known disease that's been linked to
mental disorders is Lyme disease, which is caused by the Borrelia
burgdorferi germ. First identified in the mid-1970s among children near
Lyme, Connecticut, the disease has long been known to cause nervous-system
problems and achy joints if left untreated. Now scientists are finding that
Lyme disease can also trigger a whole smorgasbord of psychiatric symptoms,
including depression. One New York man (we'll call him Joe) found out
firsthand how debilitating the disease can be. When he began having bouts of
major depression back in 1992, he had forgotten all about the tick bite he
had gotten four years earlier. He spent two years in a blur of antipsychotic
drugs, mental institutions, jails and suicide attempts. On a hunch, a doctor
at a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey had Joe tested for Lyme disease.
After an intensive course of antibiotics, Joe's improvement was dramatic and
immediate. "I started to have this fog lift," he recalls. Still, he will
probably have to be on psychotropic drugs for the rest of his life.
Some psychiatrists fret that there may be thousands of people
suffering from Lyme-induced depression without knowing why. Not only is Lyme
disease tricky to diagnose-not everybody gets the circular rash, and lab
tests still aren't wholly reliable-it can take a decade or more for mental
disorders to set in. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that nine out
of 10 cases of Lyme diseases remain unreported. There are 15 species of
borellias-making them the most common tickborne disease-producing bacteria
in the world.
For its part, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can be
found in undercooked meat and cat feces, can lead to full-blown psychotic
episodes. Some studies suggest that the parasite stimulates the production
of a chemical similar to LSD, producing hallucinations and psychosis. Even
when the parasite lies dormant in muscle and brain tissue, it can affect
attention span and reaction time in otherwise healthy people. Researchers at
Charles University in Prague have discovered that people who test positive
have slightly slower-than-average reaction times and-possibly as a
result-are almost three times as likely to have car accidents. That's a
disturbing prospect, considering that the disease is so widespread: billions
of people are thought to be infected.
Even a simple sore throat can lead to psychiatric problems.
Few children avoid coming down with a streptococcus infection, also known as
strep. Scientists now think that one in 1,000 strep sufferers also develops
abrupt-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in a matter of weeks. Strep
bacteria trigger OCD by igniting an overzealous response from the immune
system, which attacks certain types of brain cells, causing inflammation.
Symptoms generally die down after a few months but can flare up again,
especially if there's another bout of strep, says Susan Swedo, a
childhood-disease expert at the National Institutes of Health. The most
effective treatment, still experimental, is to filter out the misbehaving
antibodies from the blood. Best is to treat strep early on.
The specter of a depression germ or contagious
obsessive-compulsive disorder is unnerving, but it also opens up many more
treatment options-antibiotics, vaccines, checking for ticks. Geneticists
believe that diseases may trigger the onset of inherited mental illnesses by
activating key genes. Avoiding and treating infection may be just as
important as the genes you inherit, and a whole lot easier to do something
about.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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