Something about the combination of the tumor and the antibodies was making these women very sick.ĭr. But the most remarkable finding was that all four patients had similar antibodies that appeared to be reacting against specific areas of the brain, mainly the hippocampus. All had white blood cells in their cerebrospinal fluid, confusion, memory problems, hallucinations, delusions, and difficulty breathing, and they all had tumors called teratomas in their ovaries. Dalmau had been the senior author on a paper in the neuroscience journal Annals of Neurology that focused on four young women who had developed prominent psychiatric symptoms and encephalitis. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y.įour years earlier, in 2005, Dr. In this excerpt Cahalan tells the story of how University of Pennsylvania neuro-oncologist Josep Dalmau first identified the disorder.Įxcerpt from BRAIN ON FIRE, by Susannah Cahalan. She ended up at New York University's Langone Medical Center, where a team of doctors, led by neurologist Souhel Najjar, diagnosed her with a disease that had been discovered only two years earlier: NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Initially diagnosed with mononucleosis, Cahalan continued to grow worse, eventually suffering a series of near-fatal seizures, psychosis, and a gradual loss of brain function.

Her left hand went numb, paranoid thoughts obsessed her mind, and migraines and stomachaches beset her body.

In 2009 Susannah Cahalan was a healthy 24-year-old reporter at the New York Post, one of the country's oldest newspapers, when she suddenly developed a range of worrying symptoms.

Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan