Originally published at: How Nipah virus could change your personality forever | Boing Boing
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Is there a typical personality change? Or is it random? Wondering if its something like how toxo will increase risk based behavior in those infected, or if its just a mixed bag of stuff.
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I was reading all the linked articles to figure that out. I’m guessing, in the absence of any details, that it’s just the encephalitis causing brain trauma and thus personality changes (which is apparently known to happen).
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My Son presented with PANS/PANDAS last year, (inflammation of the basal ganglia due to an autoimmune response triggered by strep infections), sudden onset of sever OCD behaviours, inability to regulate sleep (this has been an ongoing issue) strong anxiety attacks and a couple of psychotic episodes.
Treatment is twofold, a) treat the triggering infection and protect against further infections (possibly with prophylactic antibiotics) and b) treat the inflammation for the acute symptoms.
The anti-inflammatory medications did wonders to bring our boy back. And… time. Time for the antibodies to fade away (about a 6m half-life I was told) So for a long time we seen shades of the big problems. Now, mostly we are dealing with the fallout, the trauma of the events. Also, there seems to have been a very sudden change to his sleeping (before the OCD hit).
He has a Fit-bit for kids, and it does a pretty ok job of tracking the sleep. His brother has one too, so we had a natural control.
The sleep pattern was 9-10h of “Sleep” with up to a half hour of restless. Then one day, it suddenly changed. Now it was 4-5h of “Sleep” with 5-6h of restless. This date coincided with an infection that we believe was the triggering event. So far his sleep has not improved much. If it has it would be a very slight amount if I graph it. (I tried to get the API data, but kids data is bared from FitBit’s customer accessible api for predictable reasons)
We were lucky that an acquaintance was familiar with PANDAs and was able to give us the clues and talk to our family Dr and Pediatrician. And that they were receptive to the information. I’ve read horror stories of people being institutionalized for years as it is mistaken for a psychiatric condition, a hidden-infection (hidden away and asymptomatic) could be a trigger.
Makes me think of stories of changelings, children with sudden behavioural problems thought to have been switched with a demon or fairy over night. If I was a superstitious or religious person, an exorcism would not have been out of the picture.
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