Schizophrenia can be cured with a bone marrow transplant, it can also be contracted: new study

Japanese psychiatrists described an incredible case: a patient with schizophrenia was cured quite by accident - by bone marrow transplantation. with the BBC.

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However, after they published this story in the scientific journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, it turned out that this was far from the only such case.

The authors of the article began to receive letters describing similar stories of miraculous healing, when patients managed to be accidentally cured of a mental illness - in parallel with the treatment of the underlying disease.

And now, a year later, scientists seem to understand how this happens.

Incredible story

Hallucinations in patient N. began at the age of 24. It seemed to him that thoughts flowed out of his head - and other people could see them. When watching films, it seemed to him that the actors were giving him secret signs, trying to make contact with him. He became nervous, irritable, lost sleep.

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Psychiatrist Tsueshi Miyaoka diagnosed N. with paranoid schizophrenia and prescribed him a course of antipsychotics. However, the drugs did not help - the disorder turned out to be resistant to drugs.

A year later, the patient's condition worsened. He began to tire quickly, suffocate, he began to have fever attacks. Another examination showed that N. had acute myeloid leukemia, one of the varieties of blood cancer. A bone marrow transplant was needed to save his life.

A donor was found and the transplant was successful. It was then that a miracle happened: the man's hallucinations disappeared, and with them the feeling of anxiety.

His schizophrenia was completely gone.

At first, doctors thought that this was a temporary phenomenon and the disease would return. But several years have passed, and Dr. Miyaoka confirms that the patient does not show any signs of schizophrenia, despite the fact that he is no longer taking pills.

mysterious connection

A bone marrow transplant practically resets the patient's immune system. Chemotherapy destroys old lymphocytes, new ones are formed already in the donor organ.

Of course, far-reaching conclusions cannot be drawn from just one case, and in all likelihood, N. was helped by the drugs he took before and after the transplant operation. But the recovery itself indicates that his mental state was somehow connected to the immune system.

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This is a rather improbable assumption - after all, what does our immunity have to do with the brain? However, more and more researchers are coming to the conclusion that such a relationship exists.

The first observations in this area were made more than 100 years ago. At the end of the XNUMXth century, doctors noticed that when a wave of a cold or flu passed through a psychiatric clinic, an increase in temperature caused an improvement in the mental state of patients.

The Austrian doctor Julius Wagner-Jauregg even developed a new method: he infected the mentally ill with malaria so that they developed a high fever. Some patients died as a result, but many were cured of mental illness. For this discovery, the Austrian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927.

Malaria therapy was discontinued in the 1950s as too risky.

However, a few years ago, another case was described when a mentally ill woman got rid of schizoaffective disorder, having had a blood poisoning, which was accompanied by a strong fever.

However, there is also an opposite case. In the Netherlands, a leukemia patient received a bone marrow transplant from a brother who had schizophrenia. The patient was cured of cancer - but he also developed schizophrenia.

Such cases are quite rare, but in recent decades there have been at least a dozen of them all over the planet. And scientists are actively studying the relationship of mental illness with the immune system.

According to Robert Yolken, professor of neurovirology at Johns Hopkins University, about a third of patients with schizophrenia also show signs of an immune imbalance.

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“The role of immune activation in serious mental disorders is perhaps the most interesting new direction in the study of such diseases,” says the professor.

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