Maybe ...Just Maybe: OCD and The Immune System

I am a big believer in taking action in the now when it comes to trying to help yourself with your OCD. When I was younger I felt it was much more important to know ‘why I was the way I was’. I honestly thought that if I could find that information out then then answer to what I did about would come falling into place shortly afterwards I guess. Years of experience and searching for causes has largely put paid to that line of reasoning.  At the end of the day scientists don’t know why some people have OCD and others don’t and the arguments between a genetic cause and psychological protective mechanisms has been one of the most popular polemics. 

 

The idea of knowing though has never fully left me and so I was fascinated when I came across this article on Science Daily from 2020 .(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200421094257.htm) about experiments that

Queen Mary University of London and the University of Roehampton had been conducting on mice (the poor mice, they really have had it bad in the field of experimentation!)

 

The idea is that people with OCD all seem to have elevated levels a protein called Immuno-moodulin (Imood) in their lymphocytes, a type of immune cell.

Now I have been reading an amazing book called ‘The Crack of Creation’ all about gene editing recently and the CRISPR technology is being used to cure all sorts of illnesses where there are small mutations, such as sickle cell anaemia so I totally get the idea that a small mutation somewhere along that very long DNA chain is giving rise to increased Imood proteins. We all have shed loads of mutations and some of them switch on and off depending on what is going on with other genes so I can see how such a seemingly small can have a massive profound effect upon the body. Anyway back to the mice and what the scientists did was to treat the mice with elevated levels of Imood with antibodies that neutralised the Imood and guess what! Yep, the OCD mice all started calming down and stopped exhibiting OCD like behaviour (if you’re wondering that’s stuff like digging and excessive grooming). 

They then tested the immune cells from 23 people and found that Moon was about 6 times higher than in the 'healthy' 'normal' volunteers

So on the surface it seems that simple, treat humans with antibodies to calm Imood and voila OCD cured. Well, it takes a long time to get peer reviewed, scale up to human volunteers and the like before a treatment is offered and so don’t expect anything anytime soon but hopefully within a few years, there should be an over the counter antibody additive that you can take to cure yourself of OCD. Amazing to think that that might be the case. Amazing also to think that OCD might just be a result of an immune system with a slight fault in it also but extrapolating that further that mental health in general may be just the result of what is going on the immune system. (There is already additional research to suggest the same process is responsible for ADHD too). Fascinating stuff but for now I will keep on with the exercise, the ERP when I need it and all of the things that keep me healthy in the present.