How respiratory viruses can trigger the immune system and cause psychosis

Tell me what you make of this...

When a pregnant female gets rubella (German measles) there's a good chance the baby will have serious neurological disorders, including microcephaly, mental retardation, and autism. This is called congenital rubella syndrome and it's one reason doctors are so insistent that everyone should get an MMR vaccine.

Many infections passed down from the mother cause serious brain problems in the fetus. They're called TORCH agents, which is an acronym for Toxoplasmosis, rubella, cytomegalovirus, and herpes simplex viruses. As with Epstein-Barr virus, they're all neurotropic, which means they can affect the brain.

Most neurologists assumed these pathogens were somehow unique. But in 2011, researchers at Johns Hopkins[1] studied 106 patients with recent psychotic symptoms and 196 nonpsychiatric controls. They found that serum antibodies against three non-SARS coronaviruses (HKU1, NL63, and OC43) were higher in the patients. This suggested that the psychotic patients had previous exposure to the virus and then recovered, only to be afflicted with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

This suggests that not only rubella, but also respiratory viruses like coronaviruses and influenza can cause brain disorders. But it sounds crazy. How could a respiratory virus affect the brain?

The answer is that the immune system faces a constant struggle to discriminate between pathogens and the body's own cells. When it fails, we get an autoimmune disorder. These diseases start with a trigger, maybe a dysbiotic microbiome, which is to say bad gut bacteria[6], or a bacterium or virus that triggers an immune response. If the trigger is too similar to some protein in the patient, or if the patient's immune system is weak, those antibodies—and what is even worse, those T cells, which are designed to kill other cells—can turn against the patient.

continued at https://www.randombio.com/schizophrenia2.html