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Sometimes a child unravels in days, yet weeks earlier, there was a fever nobody noted.

Two studies published this year look at immune system activity behind a sudden change in a child's behavior.

Infections like strep can trigger brain inflammation without bacteria entering the brain itself.

There is a pattern I see so often now that I no longer treat it as unusual. A child who functioned normally begins to come apart. The change is fast, sometimes over just a few days. Food narrows, rituals appear, sleep breaks. A child who could read last month cannot sit at a desk. Somewhere in the weeks before, there was a virus, a sore throat, a fever nobody thought much about, or some sort of undetermined dramatic change.

The first place these families look is to a therapist, pediatrician, or psychiatrist, who, for the most part, would not consider neuroimmune root causes. Meanwhile, the inner storm continues to escalate, and no well-meaning intervention is likely to work. These clinicians would usually focus on social-emotional-behavioral root causes and miss what is right in front of them. This is not because they are not good practitioners, but because they are ill-informed.

How do I know this? I have been that parent. Even though I suspected neuroimmune root causes from day one, I was gaslit by clinicians who presumed to know what was going on with my kids, whom I knew best.

Why does it matter? Early intervention is critical, and in some cases these conditions can be reversed if treated soon enough. But if not, these conditions can become chronic, and it is my mission to help other families so they will not be impacted by this the way we were. Two recent papers are worth noting in this regard.

Neuroimmune Reactivity

I work within a framework I call neuroimmune reactive avoidance (NRA). NRA is a lens rather than a diagnosis. It asks us to read a child's........

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