PATIENT STORIES
“My son had an abrupt onset of obsessive compulsive behaviors. He had a significant fear that he was going to die.”
Sunny’s Story
In 2nd grade, my son developed a strep infection and several illnesses including the flu. Shortly afterwards, he began having tics, emotional lability, anger and rage. He had to be homeschooled.
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Sunny:
My son was in 2nd grade, was developing normally.
Unfortunately, he had had a series of illnesses. Within a year, he had a strep throat infection,
Influenza at a weird time of the year. And he had pneumonia a few times. After that, I noticed a few things with his knuckles. He kept popping his knuckles. It seemed like a tic.
But then he had an abrupt onset of obsessive compulsive behaviors. He had a significant fear that he was going to die, which was completely out of character for him. That lasted a couple of days and then all of a sudden he started ticking, having these uncontrollable movements. And when I say uncontrollable movements, I’m speaking of about 100 tics in an hour. And he was damaging his neck because he was ticking so hard with his neck.
We started to see some very significant emotional lability. And anger and outbursts and rage, which was very atypical for our son. And at first it was just at home, these explosions. But then they started to affect his school life. We had to pull him from school for some time.
Of course we were alarmed as could be. We’re trying to get to the bottom of what might be causing this. And we are so grateful that we had a physician, who we reached out to, a neuropsychiatrist.
We were able to get the Cunningham Panel pretty early on in his onset. A couple weeks later, I received notice that those results were published and my physician went over them with me. And it was remarkable results, in that it showed there was neurologic autoimmunity and very likely, an underlying infection.
We knew he had recovered from his illnesses. That’s when the abrupt onset of symptoms happened. But he didn’t have a fever. He wasn’t presenting like a sick child.
But with the Cunningham Panel we were really able to identify that he had these circulating levels of autoantibodies and ultimately, we were able to understand that he had a mycoplasma infection. He had pneumonia, which appeared to be an active infection.
My physician thought we should treat the underlying infection, which we knew now was mycoplasma pneumonia. So they treated him with antibiotics.
Slowly we started to see some recovery.
The antibiotics helped quickly with the tics. But we started to understand his immune dysfunction. Along with the Cunningham Panel, there were some immune markers that were elevated as well.
And so we started to see that it was the result of infection but we also had to treat his immune system.
Thankfully he responded very well to some easier immune treatments. And once we treated the infection and the immune system and then we started to treat the underlying inflammation, that’s when we saw a complete recovery.
I’m grateful we were able to get diagnosed, in part using the Cunningham Panel, and also some pathogen labs. And that really changed the course of our treatment. And really changed the course of our family and his health.
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