Repositioning synthetic glucocorticoids in psychiatric disease associated with neural autoantibodies: a narrative review

Abstract

Synthetic glucocorticoids (sGCs) are a well-investigated and standard drug therapy for disorders associated with CNS inflammation. Less is known about treating psychiatric disorders associated with neural autoantibodies. Our aim is to elucidate the repositioning of sGCs in psychiatric diseases that co-exist with neural autoantibodies. We used PubMed to identify articles for this narrative review. To our knowledge, no randomized, placebo-controlled trials have yet been conducted on applying sGC to treat neural autoantibody-associated psychiatric disorders. We describe initial results of cohort studies and single cases or case series often associated with autoantibodies against membrane-surface antigens demonstrating a largely beneficial response to sGCs either as monotherapy or polytherapy together with other immunosuppressive agents. However, sGCs may be less efficient in patients with psychiatric diseases associated with autoantibodies directed against intracellular antigens. These results reveal potential benefits of the novel usage of sGCs for the indication of neural autoantibody-associated psychiatric disease. Further large-scale randomized, placebo-controlled trials are needed to discover whether sGCs are safe, well tolerated, and beneficial in subgroups of neural autoantibody-associated psychiatric diseases.

Keywords: Autoantibody; Drug repositioning; Immunotherapy; Psychiatry; Synthetic glucocorticoids.

Fig. 1

Considering the advantages and disadvantages of synthetic glucocorticoids in psychiatric disease associated with neural autoantibodies—a schematic overview. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages regarding sGC use for neural autoantibody-associated psychiatric disease. sGCs synthetic glucocorticoids