from Section 4 - Autoimmunity in Neurological and Psychiatric Diseases
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2022
In this chapter we critically trace the concept of autoimmune psychosis, and review several well-defined autoimmune diseases that can manifest with psychosis. After the discovery of anti-NMDAR encephalitis, several studies suggested that NMDAR antibodies could occur in patients with psychosis caused by primary psychiatric diseases. This led to a generalized NMDAR antibody testing without much consideration for validation of results, the use of appropriate controls, or whether the antibodies were also present in CSF (most studies only partially examined serum). Two consequences of this uncontrolled testing were: (1) the wide range in prevalence of serum NMDAR antibodies (from 0% to 20% in patients with many different diseases, including healthy controls) among different laboratories often using the same commercial diagnostic test; and (2) the lack of clinical significance of the findings. These inconclusive studies refocused the attention of investigators to search for a specific psychiatric phenotype of anti-NMDAR encephalitis, but no specific phenotype could be identified. However, there are several important clinical clues that suggest when a first episode of psychosis is autoimmune, and we provide a diagnostic algorithm to identify these cases. Aside from anti-NMDAR encephalitis, psychiatric manifestations are prominent in three other disorders: paediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infection (PANDAS), Hashimoto encephalopathy, and neuropsychiatric manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). In the first two disorders the autoimmune basis is unclear and no pathogenic antibodies have been identified. In SLE, none of the antibodies reported to be associated with neuropsychiatric manifestations has shown neuropsychiatric symptom specificity. Moreover, none of the SLE antibodies has shown properties similar to those of neuronal surface antibodies related to autoimmune encephalitis, which associate with specific syndromes, alter neuronal function by direct interaction with the cell surface target, and cause symptoms in animal models, including psychotic-like behaviour.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.