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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

Clinical and biological markers of autoimmunity in patients presenting with severe and difficult-to-treat psychiatric conditions

Clinical and biological markers for autoimmunity in patients presenting with severe and difficult to treat psychiatric states

Integrating blood and cerebrospinal fluid investigations into psychiatric assessment helps distinguish etiological subgroups within psychiatric diagnoses and facilitates the early recognition of treatable autoimmune processes.

Psychiatric symptoms can be common early manifestations of autoimmune processes and may emerge years before an immunological diagnosis. The presentation introduces the multidisciplinary assessment pathway that the Uppsala University immunopsychiatry team has developed since 2015 for patients with moderate to severe mental disorders. It provides examples of clinical presentations, disease courses, and warning signs (red flags) suggestive of systemic autoimmune disorders such as Sjögren disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune thyroiditis, multiple sclerosis, and autoimmune encephalitis. Multiple coexisting autoimmune diagnoses are common in this patient group. Blood tests for disease-specific antibodies; cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) investigations, including cell counts, IgG index, oligoclonal bands, kappa free light chains, markers of tissue damage, and disease-specific antibodies; and neuroimaging may support earlier recognition of neuroinflammatory conditions and help distinguish them from infectious, neurodegenerative, or other psychiatric conditions. Markers such as sCD27 are noted as potentially more sensitive indicators of T-cell activation, particularly when CSF investigations are informative. Although the abstract presents no numerical data, the team's preliminary findings suggest that treatment targeting underlying autoimmunity may lead to substantial improvement in psychiatric symptoms.

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