Teratoma Essay

Soon after, three more young female patients, each with similar symptoms to those of Susannah’s were referred to Dalmau; all had teratomas and all suffered behavioral and personality transformations that deteriorated into destructive neurological damage. Suspecting that the teratomas played a critical role in this unfolding medical discovery, doctors removed the teratomas and administered immune-suppressing medication, resulting in the rapid recovery of three out of the four women (Braverman 3). However, they still had to discover the source of the problem. In Dalmau’s lab, researchers exposed rat brains to the patients’ spinal fluid. Bingo. The brains showed evidence of an attack by antibodies, or specialized proteins that protect the immune system, which were most likely produced as part of the body’s response to the patients’ teratomas (Dalmau 63). Basically, teratomas contain various cell types that, when they cross-react with NMDA receptors, which can affect memory and learning in the brain, basically make one’s system vulnerable to a breakdown of the immune system. This creates a confusion in the body that produces autoantibodies which …show more content…
The diagnosis of NMDAR relies heavily on the detection of the NMDA-related autoantibodies (Ryan 159). The treatment of this disease can be frustrating since there is no established standard of care, being that NMDAR is still relatively new. There is also clashing data in the literature that makes one method of treatment difficult to spread to doctors (Mann). This actually creates a unique problem related to treatment which involves access to care, revealing broad difficulties with processing new medical