[Humoral and cellular immunologic reactions in various forms of chronic psychiatric diseases]

Studies on the status of the immune system in mental disorders have mostly provided contradictory results. For example, some authors have reported dramatic increases of immunoglobulin G in schizophrenic patients, and others a decrease of immunoglobulin G in the same patients. This prompted us to undertake a study on a large cohort of psychiatric patients (120 schizophrenics, 30 manic-depressives, 8 epileptics, 48 cases of Alzheimer and vascular dementia, 23 cases of alcoholic dementia, 14 cases of childhood psychosis, 47 encephalopaths, and 21 chronic alcoholics), all chronically hospitalized. Plasma antitetanus antibodies were assayed in 238 previously immunized patients, the tuberculin test was performed on 302 patients, and the candidine test on 287 patients. Furthermore, 21 patients had an antitetanus vaccine booster injection with antibodies assayed before the injection and one month later, and 31 patients had 2 tuberculin tests with a year or more between them. The results show no major abnormal immune disorders in the patients. Nevertheless some particular features have been found. The first is a very significant relation between the age and the weakness of the immune defences. The second is a large scattering of the blood tetanus antibodies titers in schizophrenic patients, specially in the paranoid subgroup (20.6% of abnormally high or low titers). And the third is the existence of inpredictable variations in the responses when stimulations, or tests, are repeated. These results can raise the hypothesis of a state-dependent component of the immune response in mentally ill patients, but further in, depth studies are needed for better understanding the nature of our findings.