Psychopathology of psychiatric patients presenting autoantibodies against neuroglial antigens.

Background: Autoantibody-mediated psychiatric disorder is often difficult to diagnose as the clinical features of psychiatric disorder associated with neural autoantibodies are often similar. Thus, it is of major relevance to investigate whether psychopathology can differentiate between both disease entities as a biomarker and help us in searching for specific autoantibodies associated with psychiatric symptoms. Methods: We enrolled 154 patients of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the University Medical Center Göttingen with psychopathology data and retrospectively evaluated their patient records using the classification systems AMDP (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Methodik und Dokumentation in der Psychiatrie) and HiTOP (Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology). Results: We identified 35 psychiatric patients revealing autoantibodies in their serum and/or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and 119 with no autoantibodies. Relying on the AMDP system, many more psychiatric patients with serum autoantibodies (51%) had problems with orientation than those without autoantibodies (32%) ( Conclusion: Our findings indicate that neural autoantibodies in psychiatric patients could indicate a phenotype more often characterized by a manic syndrome, orientation disturbances within the cognitive spectrum, and fewer affect disturbances characterized by less blunted affect and not as seriously impaired feelings of vitality compared to controls. The novelty of our approach is the extensive autoantibody tests for various psychiatric syndromes in combination with a profound psychometric measurement with two different scales.