The study seemed to crystallize the connections among infections, obsessive behavior, and eating disorders that Breithaupt and other researchers had been seeing. In her work as a psychologist, Breithaupt says, she has seen patients who, after an infection, “have really rigid thoughts and impressions about either food or weight or its shape, or they might have lots of concerns about fat in foods and fat in their body.” Carandang’s PANDAS patient, too, seemed to first grow obsessed with food, then fixate on avoiding it.
No one knows exactly why, precisely, infections might spark eating disorders. Breithaupt suggests that either the infection itself or the antibiotic used to treat it might be disrupting the patient’s gut microbiome, the collection of microorganisms in the intestine that plays a role in health and disease. This disruption might change the amount of chemicals called neuropeptides circulating in the gut. Because the gut communicates with the brain, the quantities of neuropeptides circulating in the brain might then change, as well. That could, in essence, make people think differently about food or their body.
Perhaps other mechanisms are at play. One competing theory is that the body’s own immune response to an infection might end up invading the brain. When the body senses a dangerous bug, it produces proteins that destroy the invader. But some of those proteins can also attack our own cells. In possible cases of anorexia or bulimia induced by bacteria, some scientists suspect that these proteins get into parts of the brain that control impulses such as disgust and hunger. There, they might attack the brain tissues or switch on the “I’m not hungry anymore” impulse, or even the “I’m disgusted by my own body” impulse.
There’s no direct evidence for these theories; for now they’re merely speculation. And even if one of them proved correct, researchers would still have to contend with the mystery of why people get infections all the time but relatively few develop eating disorders. Or, for that matter, why not everyone with an eating disorder recently dealt with an infection.
It might be that underlying factors about people predispose them to developing an eating disorder after an infection. “Maybe you have more of a genetic risk for obsessive-compulsive disorder or anorexia, and the infection then unmasks that vulnerability. That’s one possibility,” says Kyle Williams, the director of the pediatric-neuropsychiatry-and-immunology program at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children.
If confirmed, these findings could eventually affect how eating disorders are treated, leading doctors to check if their eating-disorder patients have any lingering infections, Breithaupt says. The results also have the potential to radically change our notion of the many ways eating disorders might originate. While most professionals acknowledge that anorexia and bulimia are deeply psychologically rooted, some eating-disorder patients still face stigma for supposedly being so “vain” as to starve themselves. It’s less likely that people would accuse a person of getting meningitis on purpose. Similarly, people who are attacked for compulsively dieting out of vanity might simply be under the spell of antibodies gone awry.