FWIW I have felt better on Antibiotics as well. I have also seen my IL-8 go down in response to both Doxycycline and Azithromycin. Of course, nobody seems to know why my IL-8 is so high to begin with, so its not clear why this is.
I wonder if PANDAS can be considered an autoimmune disease that is triggered by bacteria (strep)? Or Rheumatic Fever?
Also, Dr. Edwards, what do you make of persistently elevated CD4 T Cells?
PANDAS and rheumatic fever do not seem to be autoimmune diseases because nobody, as far as I know, has found an antibody or T cell reaction against self the stands up to scrutiny. Rheumatic fever looks like a delayed immune complex reaction over a week or so, presumably with bacterial antigen still the basis of the complex (not self). The long term effects are likely to be due to scarring. There is a mouse model of PANDAS that seems to get anti-complement antibody. This would be autoimmune strictly speaking, but it may be a transient effect like transient rheumatoid factor with acute infection - which as far as we know causes no disease itself. The difference with true autoimmune
disease is that there is long term production of autoantibody that causes tissue damage.
So although it was rheumatic fever that kicked off the interest in autoimmunity in the 1960s it is probably not autoimmune.
A high CD4 T cell count might seem to be a good thing since CD4 T cells are useful! But in reality circulating lymphocyte counts are of very little significance. The circulation is just a traffic zone. It says nothing about what is going on in the lymphoid tissue. It is only relevant if levels are very very low - indicating no useful cells, or very very high, indicating a leukaemia (but then they are abnormal cells and hardly ever T cells).