Harvey Black | Sep 12, 1999 | 6 min read
For about a decade, Susan Swedo, chief of the Pediatric and Developmental Neuropsychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has been investigating how an ordinary strep infection can trigger an autoimmune response leading to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She, her colleagues at NIMH, and other researchers have been exploring this link with a goal of better understanding the role of the brain in mental disorders and developing better OCD treatments. Though strep is