Diseases Of The Mind

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Diseases Of The Mind

Bacteria, Viruses And Parasites May Cause Mental Illnesses Like

Depression And Perhaps Even Autism And Anorexia

Janet Ginsburg

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2003

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 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 land,

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 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 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 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.

WITH JOANNA KOWALSKA IN WARSAW

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/60723