All posts tagged: autoimmune

We may finally have a cure for many different autoimmune conditions

We may finally have a cure for many different autoimmune conditions

Published by skeptic

Illustration of T-cells attacking a growing cancer cell Location South/Alamy Our immune systems never stop targeting cells they regard as a threat, so it’s really bad news when rogue immune cells mistakenly turn on us, as they do in autoimmune conditions. Existing treatments suppress these attacks, but don’t stop them. But a new approach that addresses the cause of these disorders by killing off the rogue cells is proving wildly successful. “All the big pharma companies are jumping on the bandwagon now,” says Reuben Benjamin at King’s College London. There are dozens of clinical trials under way around the world, and the first treatments could be approved as early as next year, he says, as they’re proving to be vastly superior to those currently used. The key to these new treatments are genetically engineered cells known as CAR T-cells. These are made from the T-cells that your immune system usually employs to kill off invasive bacteria or virus-infected cells. The T-cells are extracted from a person, programmed to attack a specific kind of cell and …

How autoimmune conditions can unexpectedly drive mental illness

How autoimmune conditions can unexpectedly drive mental illness

Published by skeptic

Fifteen years ago, a string of women at a neurological hospital in London all showed signs of the same strange illness. Some were stiff and stuporous, while others were experiencing seizures or issues with movement. But their experiences had all begun with what seemed like textbook episodes of psychosis, complete with agitation, hallucinations and delusions. In the throes of those symptoms, some had gone to emergency departments or psychiatric hospitals. Their early notes read to neuropsychiatrist Thomas Pollak as classic cases of mental ill health. But it turned out that these people actually had a condition called autoimmune encephalitis, inflammation of the brain caused by an assault from the immune system. The fact that an autoimmune condition could produce psychosis shattered the usual divide between psychiatric and neurological illnesses and “kind of blew my mind”, says Pollak. In the years since, Pollak, now at King’s College London, has helped define an emerging field of study, one beginning to show that autoimmune disease plays a larger role in mental illness than conventional wisdom suggests. This link …

The Biggest Hope for Curing Autoimmune Disease

The Biggest Hope for Curing Autoimmune Disease

Published by Daniella Wilson

By the time Fabian Müller met the patient at the center of his newest research paper, he was fairly certain that an experimental treatment was her last hope. The patient, a 47-year-old mother of two, had for years been battling three severe autoimmune diseases, all of which were triggering her body to attack components of her blood. Her doctors had made nine separate attempts to treat her conditions, but none of them had worked. By the start of 2025, she’d been confined to a hospital in Dresden, Germany, for more than two months, being dosed with multiple immunosuppressive drugs and receiving up to three daily transfusions of red blood cells, as her care team tried and failed to control a massive disease flare. In desperation, the woman’s care team reached out to Müller, a hematologist-oncologist at the University Hospital of Erlangen, a roughly three-hour drive away by ambulance. In recent years, he and his colleagues have made a name for themselves pioneering experimental CAR-T cell treatments—a type of personalized immunotherapy originally developed for cancer—against a …

Large-scale study links autoimmune diseases to higher rates of depression and anxiety

Large-scale study links autoimmune diseases to higher rates of depression and anxiety

Published by José Betancourt

People diagnosed with autoimmune diseases experience mood and anxiety disorders at nearly double the rate of the general population. Data from more than 1.5 million adults in the United Kingdom suggests that persistent physical inflammation is closely tied to this elevated mental health risk. The findings were published in the journal BMJ Mental Health. Medical professionals label depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder as affective disorders. These psychological conditions alter a person’s mood, emotional state, and daily functioning. Autoimmune diseases have entirely different visible symptoms, occurring when the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its own healthy tissues as if they were foreign threats. Conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and lupus cause chronic, widespread inflammation throughout the body. In recent years, medical researchers have noticed a distinct connection between immune system activity and mental health outcomes. Blood markers that indicate an active immune response, such as specific proteins and cellular messengers, frequently run high in individuals experiencing depression or anxiety. Some studies even show that administering standard antidepressant medications corresponds with a drop in …