Finally, out of nowhere, the creature manifests one or a few symptoms from the extensive collection of neuropsychiatry.
All of them are capable of pointing to encephalitis, that is, inflammations in the central nervous system.
Most of the time, they are caused by infectious agents, such as the herpes virus, syphilis, measles and Epstein-Barr, to name just a few. And then, in infections, they are accompanied by headache and fever, which does not always happen if the cause is different. But no one paid as much attention to other causes in the recent past.
Especially because it was thought that it was almost an exception to find an inflamed brain due, solely and exclusively, to a problem with the individual’s own immune system.
“However, over the last 15 years, researchers have been identifying antibodies that trigger these attacks and have developed tests using them as markers to detect patients with autoimmune encephalitis”, says rheumatologist Luís Eduardo Coelho Andrade, professor at Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo) and medical advisor in immunology at Grupo Fleury.
Today, dozens of them are already known. The Fleury Group, it should be said, is one of those responsible — with Einstein Hospital Israelita, in São Paulo, and the University of Vienna, in Austria, as partners — for the BrAIN project (acronym for “Brazilian Autoimmune Encephalitis Network”). It is a network uniting 17 centers from various regions of the country to investigate situations like this. This allowed Fleury to create tests that look for the most common groups of antibodies here, the famous panels.
