#immune system

[reasonsforhope]

Story from the Washington Post here, non-paywall version here.

Washington Post stop blocking linksharing and shit challenge.

"The young woman was catatonic, stuck at the nurses’ station — unmoving, unblinking and unknowing of where or who she was.

Her name was April Burrell.

Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.

April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.

“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.” ...

It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries...

Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.

After months of targeted treatments [for lupus] — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.

The awakening of April — and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions — now stand to transform care for some of psychiatry’s sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions.

Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.

And scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.

Although the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated.

“These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.” ...

Waking up after two decades

The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus...

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately...

A joyful reunion

“I’ve always wanted my sister to get back to who she was,” Guy Burrell said.

In 2020, April was deemed mentally competent to discharge herself from the psychiatric hospital where she had lived for nearly two decades, and she moved to a rehabilitation center...

Because of visiting restrictions related to covid, the family’s face-to-face reunion with April was delayed until last year. April’s brother, sister-in-law and their kids were finally able to visit her at a rehabilitation center, and the occasion was tearful and joyous.

“When she came in there, you would’ve thought she was a brand-new person,” Guy Burrell said. “She knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.” ...

The family felt as if they’d witnessed a miracle.

“She was hugging me, she was holding my hand,” Guy Burrell said. “You might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadn’t seen her like that in, like, forever.”

“It was like she came home,” Markx said. “We never thought that was possible.”

...After April’s unexpected recovery, the medical team put out an alert to the hospital system to identify any patients with antibody markers for autoimmune disease. A few months later, Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist and director of the Columbia Lupus Center,who had been on April’s treatment team, approached Markx. “I think we found our girl,” she said.

Bringing back Devine

When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her, [and over the years, things got worse].

For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life.

Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with intellectual disability.

She was on a laundry list of drugs — two antipsychotic medications, lithium, clonazepam, Ativan and benztropine — that came with a litany of side effects but didn’t resolve all her symptoms...

She also had lupus, which she had been diagnosed with when she was about 14, although doctors had never made a connection between the disease and her mental health...

Last August, the medical team prescribed monthly immunosuppressive infusions of corticosteroids and chemotherapy drugs, a regime similar to what April had been given a few years prior. By October, there were already dramatic signs of improvement.

“She was like ‘Yeah, I gotta go,’” Markx said. “‘Like, I’ve been missing out.’”

After several treatments, Devine began developing awareness that the voices in her head were different from real voices, a sign that she was reconnecting with reality. She finished her sixth and final round of infusions in January.

In March, she was well enough to meet with a reporter. “I feel like I’m already better,” Devine said during a conversation in Markx’s office at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she was treated. “I feel myself being a person that I was supposed to be my whole entire life.” ...

Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said...

Today, Devine lives with her mother and is leading a more active and engaged life. She helps her mother cook, goes to the grocery store and navigates public transportation to keep her appointments. She is even babysitting her siblings’ young children — listening to music, taking them to the park or watching “Frozen 2” — responsibilities her family never would have entrusted her with before her recovery.

Expanding the search for more patients

While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues...

The cases of April and Devine also helped inspire the development of the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia, which was named for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which awarded it a $75 million grant in April. The goal of the center is to develop new treatments based on specific genetic and autoimmune causes of psychiatric illness, said Joseph Gogos, co-director of the SNF Center.

Markx said he has begun care and treatment on about 40 patients since the SNF Center opened. The SNF Center is working with the New York State Office of Mental Health, which oversees one of the largest public mental health systems in America, to conduct whole genome sequencing and autoimmunity screening on inpatients at long-term facilities.

For “the most disabled, the sickest of the sick, even if we can help just a small fraction of them, by doing these detailed analyses, that’s worth something,�� said Thomas Smith, chief medical officer for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “You’re helping save someone’s life, get them out of the hospital, have them live in the community, go home.”

Discussions are underway to extend the search to the 20,000 outpatients in the New York state system as well. Serious psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, are more likely to be undertreated in underprivileged groups. And autoimmune disorders like lupus disproportionately affect women and people of color with more severity.

Changing psychiatric care

How many people ultimately will be helped by the research remains a subject of debate in the scientific community. But the research has spurred excitement about the potential to better understand what is going on in the brain during serious mental illness...

Emerging research has implicated inflammation and immunological dysfunction as potential players in a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and autism.

“It opens new treatment possibilities to patients that used to be treated very differently,” said Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Clinic Freiburg in Germany.

In one study, published last year in Molecular Psychiatry, Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues identified 91 psychiatric patients with suspected autoimmune diseases, and reported that immunotherapies benefited the majority of them.

Belinda Lennox, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford, is enrolling patients in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of immunotherapy for autoimmune psychosis patients.

As a result of the research, screenings for immunological markers in psychotic patients are already routine in Germany, where psychiatrists regularly collect samples from cerebrospinal fluid.

Markx is also doing similar screening with his patients. He believes highly sensitive and inexpensive blood tests to detect different antibodies should become part of the standard screening protocol for psychosis.

Also on the horizon: more targeted immunotherapy rather than current “sledgehammer approaches” that suppress the immune system on a broad level, said George Yancopoulos, the co-founder and president of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron.

“I think we’re at the dawn of a new era. This is just the beginning,” said Yancopoulos."

-via The Washington Post, June 1, 2023

#mental illness #schizophrenia #schizoaffective #psychotic disorders #psychology #neurology #autoimmune #autoimmine disease #neuroscience #medical news #medical research #catatonia #immunotherapy #immune system #clinical trials #good news #hope

[scopnotes]

I needed to make a reference sheet for all those people!!

#immune system #white blood cell #cell oc #speculative biology #bacteria #leucocytes #original character #character design #scopnotart

[catchymemes]

#virus #immune system #William Papadin #Shakira - She Wolf #dark souls #funny #gaming #video games

[mindblowingscience]

The discovery of a particular subgroup of antibodies may open the door to more effective dengue therapeutics and the development of a universal dengue vaccine. Dengue fever is a viral infection with a devastating twist: those who have caught it once are more likely to develop life-threatening disease the second time around. Why our bodies not only fail to learn from prior infection but also become more vulnerable as a result is a longstanding mystery that has prevented development of a universal dengue vaccine. Rather than protecting against disease, such a dengue vaccine could instead serve as a first exposure to prime the body for it. The new antibodies are those responsible for dengue’s increased deadliness upon second exposure. “We definitively proved that it’s not the presence of dengue antibodies that are a problem, but the quality of those antibodies,” says Stylianos Bournazos, a research associate professor in the laboratory of Jeffrey Ravetch, a professor at Rockefeller University. “Now that we know the pathway that these antibodies use, we can develop therapeutics against it.”

Continue Reading.

#Dengue #Dengue Fever #science #biology #medicine #stem #immune system #Vaccines

[that-gay-jedi]

Hey idk if this is the time for a PSA but I keep seeing this trope in sickfic which is fine but in real life please for the love of all that is good in this world

DO NOT MASSAGE SOMEONE WHO IS SICK WITH A FEVER

You could make them much sicker or possibly cause them to be sick for longer than they otherwise would.

Source: I went to massage school but didn't graduate because reasons*.

This goes double if the sick person (or your whumpee) has any kind of issues with their immune system (compromisation, immunosuppressant medical treatments, autoimmune illnesses, etc.)

If the aim is to comfort and soothe them, you can lightly rub or stroke someone's skin, but keep your hand movement to one single direction (NOT back and forth like left and right or up and down or lateral-medial or distal-proximal etc. Keep it to ONE. SINGLE. DIRECTION) and do not apply enough pressure that you can feel their skin move under your palm(s) even a little tiny bit. Ever.

Massage moves fluids that are involved in the immune system, such as blood and lymphatic fluid, around the body. This effect is responsible for some of the known health benefits of massage and can do many useful things for a healthy person.

During a viral or other systemic infection, lymph nodes all throughout the body become the gathering sites for white blood cells fscing off against the invading pathogen. The resultant swelling is what causes the all-over body aches you feel when you're sick.

By accelerating circulation in a sick person, you can move cells of whichever virus or bacterium the body is fighting around to replicate in loads of locations it hadn't reached, giving it a chance to explode in numbers and forcing the immune system to play catch-up. You've now multiplied how many fronts the battle must be fought on and with only the same forces the body had before.

The human body uses its own resources and has limits to how quickly it can replace lost immune system cells. A virus siezes the host cell's resources to replicate itself and therefore faces no such disadvantage.

* the reasons were transphobic staff, fucked up policies, and an unbelievably shitty response from the school when classmates who hadn't practiced on me yet were asking those who already had about my genitals. I had excellent grades.

#immune system #massage #psa

[sicktember]

Sicktember 2023 Prompt-Based Resources to Help You Get Started! 💚

Types of Self Care

everydayhealth.com (comprehensive overview)

mhanational.org (Mental health recovery self-care)

recreation.ku.edu (7 pillars of self-care)

How the Immune System Works

Youtube (basic explanation)

my.clevelandclinic.org (comprehensive overview)

Ways to Avoid Getting Sick

intermountainhealthcare.org (basic prevention)

health.harvard.edu (boosting your immune system)

Fevers

texaschildrens.org (myths and facts)

merkmanuals.com (fevers in adults)

kidshealth.org (fevers in children)

White Coat Syndrome

healthline.com (white coat hypertension)

wellnesscounselingmilwaukee.com (fear of doctors)

Old Wives Tales

premierhealth.com (colds, fevers, and the flu)

womanshealthmag.com (old wives tales that work)

Anxious Stomach

adaa.org (causes of stomach pain and calming techniques)

psychcentral.com (anxiety and vomiting)

themighty.com (blog post: vomiting during a panic attack)

Cramping Pain

my.clevelandclinic.org (abdominal)

mayoclinic.org (muscle)

reumatology.org (growing pains)

Terms of Endearment

fluentinthreemonths.com (nicknames by language)

joincake.com (nicknames by relationship)

mypetname.com (cute/funny nicknames by relationship)

Coughing

truecare.org (types of coughs)

coughpro.com (types of coughs- more detail)

foundation.chestnet.org (about coughing)

Sneezing

healthline.com (comprehensive overview)

expedia.ca (worldwide responses to sneezing)

inpactgrouphr.com (worldwide sneeze onomatopoeia and responses)

Confusion/Disorientation

healthdirect.gov.au (comprehensive overview)

nhs.uk (sudden onset)

Conjunctivitis/Eye Infection

health.maryland.gov (PDF 'pink eye' fact sheet)

demi.org (types of conjunctivitis)

aao.org (how to apply eyedrops w/ an alt method for anxiety)

Uncooperative Patient

seniordirectory.com (written for seniors but very good advice)

kidcarepediatrics.com (giving meds to an uncooperative child)

hpclive.com (tips for handling an angry patient)

side effects/adverse reactions

fda.gov (finding and learning about medication side effects)

mhaus.org (adverse reactions to anesthesia)

buzzrx.com (5 types of meds w/ serious side-effects)

Patient Zero

cdc.gov (monitoring and tracking diseases)

contacttracing.ashm.org.au (how contact tracing works)

Hugs!

dignityhealth.org (four benefits)

somatechnology.com (how hugs affect humans)

Headaches

medicalnewstoday.com (11 types of headaches)

ninds.nih.gov (comprehensive overview)

#sicktember #sicktember 2023 #resources and advice #self care #immune system #fever #white coat syndrome #old wives tales #anxious stomach #cramping pain #coughing #sneezing #disorientation #pink eye #uncooperative patient #side effects #patient zero #hugs #headache #sickfic thoughts #writing illness #sickfic prompts #sick character #writing reference #writing ref #reference guide #sick ref #sicfic #sick fic

[eliana-system]

The thing about me wearing a mask is that some students will come to me to complain about how they "don't understand how I can bear to wear it, it's so hard" and that they "cheated " when it was illegal not to wear them and then look flabbergasted when I actually point out that they are participating in disabled people's death. When I point out that they can't know who has a weakened immune system so they can avoid them. That Covid is a multi system infection that will impact your immune system the more you catch it.

#eliana talks #cripple punk #cpunk #ableism #cripplepunk #immune system #mask #keep masking #and especially #keep masks in healthcare

[cbirt]

A research team led by Prof. Nir Hacohen from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, designed the study Dictionary of Immune Responses to Cytokines at single-cell resolution. This dictionary is a compilation of single-cell transcriptomic profiles of over 17 immune cell types in response to each of 86 cytokines (>1,400 cytokine–cell type pairings). Immune Dictionary expands our understanding of the activation states of all immune cell types, generates new hypotheses for cytokine functions, highlights the pleiotropic effects of cytokines, and offers a framework for determining the roles of particular cytokines and cell-cell communication networks in any immune response.

A large class of tiny, secreted proteins known as cytokines attach to specific receptors on target cells to initiate local or systemic action. This initiates downstream signaling and coordinates immune system cell types’ actions. Numerous illnesses, such as cancer and autoimmune diseases, are treated with cytokine-based medicines and cytokine antagonists. A large number of studies have been conducted depicting the central role of cytokines in immune function. However, a generalized global view of the cellular responses of each immune cell type to each cytokine was lacking. To fix this breach, the Immune Dictionary was introduced.

In order to create a large-scale perturbational single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) dataset of the immune system, the researchers methodically profiled single-cell transcriptomic (single-cell RNA sequencing, or scRNA-seq) responses to 86 cytokines across more than 17 immune cell types in mouse lymph nodes in vivo. This allowed them to obtain a comprehensive view of cellular responses to cytokines. The 86 cytokines comprise representative molecules from other families with cytokine functions as well as the majority of members of its major families, such as interleukin-1 (IL-1), common γ-chain/IL-13/thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP), common β-chain, IL-6/IL-12, IL-10, IL-17, interferon (types I, II, and III), complement, and growth factor families.

Continue Reading

#bioinformatics #immunology #immune system #cytokines

[willowreader]

A good article reminding everyone to eat healthy to protect your microbiome. There are foods everyone should eat to make your microbiome much healthier.

#covid #microbiome #gut health #immune system

[buggbuzz]

hello friends. i do not scream about the fact that i am a biology major often enough. it is the best thing ever. im obsessed with biology. so now you are gonna see art about it.

anyways the other day i was thinkin about bacteriophages being used to fight infections that are resistant to antibiotics (superbugs) and i was like "it is so silly that the immune cells are working WITH viruses for once" and then it came to me

#buzzart #buggie's nerd stuff #biology #biology art #bacteriophage #macrophage #immune system #medicine #medical #medical art #microbiology #microbiology art #art #artist

[biohackhealthnow]

The Holidays are here, and so are delicious meals. Let's give our gut some extra love and support for processing these delicous foods for us and keeping our digestive system optimal and healthy 💛

#biohacking #health #supplements #wellness #guthealth #healthylifestyle #health and wellness #probiotics #healthyhabits #probioprobiotic #nutrition #healthy #digestivehealth #digestive system #digestivewellness #immune system #immunesupport #immune health

[scopnotes]

Synaps! (He/Him)

He’s the boss of my white blood cell ocs. He’s a tyrannical dendritic cell who hates disappointment.

He uses electric shocks for communicating orders and attacks.

#immune system #white blood cell #cell oc #speculative biology #dendritic cell #leucocytes #original character #character design #scopnotart

[shelovesplants]

Trying to boost my immune system🙌 lots of fruit and vitamins

#fruit #strawberry #strawberries #mandarin #healthy #healthy food #immune system #oranges #healthy eating #fruit lover #fruit aesthetic #healthy aesthetic

[mindblowingscience]

Planes, trains, boats, automobiles and even feet. During the past decades and centuries, global travel and human migration have made all of us more worldly — from our broadening awareness of the world beyond our birthplaces, to our more sophisticated palates, to our immune systems that are increasingly challenged by unfamiliar bacteria and viruses. In the elderly, these newly imported pathogens can gain the upper hand frighteningly quickly. Unfortunately, however, vaccination in this age group isn’t as effective as it is in younger people. Now a study conducted in mice by Stanford Medicine and the National Institute of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories provides tantalizing evidence that it may one day be possible to rev up an elderly immune system with a one-time treatment that modulates the composition of a type of immune cell. The treatment significantly improved the ability of geriatric animals’ immune systems to tackle a new virus head on, as well as to respond vigorously to vaccination — enabling them to fight off a new threat months later.

Continue Reading.

#Immunology #immune system #Biology #Medicine #aging #stem

[tumble-tv]

No one:

Me and my eight boxes of masks:

#chronic illness #chronicpain #chronic disability #other chronic illness bs #chronic disease #chronically ill #disabled #fibromyalgia #undiagnosed chronic illness #disablity #immunosuppression #immunosuppressants #immunocompromised #immune system #chronic disorder #chronic pain #chronic fatigue #invisible illness #physical disability #invisible disability #disability #physically disabled #cpunk #cripple life #cripple problems #cripple punk #crip punk #covid masks #masks #face mask

[brandyschillace]

Shocking news: “When you're infected with #measles, your #immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it's ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses, every #vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent.” If you are #antivax, you are courting death.

Please Vaccinate!

#vaccine #measles #immune system #anti vaxxers #medicine #science #health #vaccination #vaccinate your kids #get vaccinated #immunocompromised