View clinical trials related to PANS.
Filter by:This study is a brief (3 month) longitudinal study following children between the ages of 4-16 years old who have been diagnosed with Pediatric Acute-Onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS). Parents and children (who are at a 2nd grade reading level) will complete questionnaires online or in person weekly for 3 months. Additionally, parents will track their child's symptoms 3 times/week using a mobile application for 3 months. The investigators are hoping to begin to characterize the longitudinal trajectory of neuropsychiatric symptoms in children with PANS. Additionally, the study will seek to identify baseline demographic and clinical characteristics (e.g., gender, recent onset versus chronic course, GAS versus other triggers) that predict severity of baseline neuropsychiatric symptoms and predict change in symptoms over time.
The purpose of this research study is to know if the antibiotic azithromycin, an antibiotic approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating infections, improves symptom severity in children with sudden and severe onset obsessive compulsive symptoms known as PANS, Pediatric Acute Onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome, and PANDAS, Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcus. This study seeks to compare the effects of placebo vs. azithromycin on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) symptom severity as well as to assess immune risk factors in children with PANDAS/PANS. Obsessions are repetitive, unwanted thoughts or worries that may be unpleasant, silly, or embarrassing. Compulsions are repetitive or ritualistic actions that are performed to ease anxiety or worries. Doctors think these symptoms may be caused or exacerbated by certain infections such as Streptococcus pyogenes, Mycoplasma pneumonia, Borrelia burgordfi, etc. These infections commonly cause strep throat, walking pneumonia, and Lyme Disease, among others. This study will involve a 4 week double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial of azithromycin (Double Blind Phase). At the end of this 4 week trial, the child will be assigned to azithromycin for 8 weeks (Open Label Phase). At the end of these 12 weeks, a Naturalistic Observation phase will assess the child's symptom characteristics for up to 40 weeks. The study hypothesizes that children receiving antibiotic will show significantly greater overall improvement in severity compared with placebo, and that children with sudden onset of OCD and whose subsequent course shows dramatic fluctuations will have evidence of immune risk factors that predisposes to this presentation.