PANS / PANDAS Therapy for Connecticut Families

Yes. The Beta Program is based in North Haven, CT, and serves families across Connecticut in-person and via telehealth. We also offer nationwide consultation, parent coaching, professional coaching for mental health clinicians, and school and community education on PANS, PANDAS, and neuroimmune-mediated presentations. Book a discovery call to find out whether we're the right fit for your family.

No. The Beta Program is a non-medical mental health practice. While we can identify symptoms and make a provisional diagnosis, PANS and PANDAS are medical diagnoses that must be made by a physician. If appropriate, we help connect families with trusted, experienced physicians who know how to evaluate these conditions while we support the behavioral and emotional pieces.

Within hours to days. The abrupt, dramatic onset is one of the defining features and one of the most important pieces of clinical history. Parents who can pinpoint a specific week, or specific morning, when their child changed are describing something clinically meaningful, not exaggerating.

Acceptance of PANS/PANDAS in mainstream pediatrics, school systems, and general mental health has grown significantly since the original 1998 NIMH papers, but it remains uneven. Major academic medical centers including Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Massachusetts General Hospital have dedicated fellowships, research programs, and clinical centers focused on these medically recognized neuroimmune conditions. There are hundreds of peer-reviewed research articles supporting the legitimacy of both PANS and PANDAS. The PANS Research Consortium has published consensus diagnostic and treatment guidelines (Swedo 2012, multi-part 2017 treatment guidelines in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Psychopharmacology), and organizations like PANDAS Network, ASPIRE, and the Neuroimmune Foundation maintain directories of PANS/PANDAS-aware providers. If your current team is dismissive, you are not without recourse, you are looking in the wrong corner of the field.

Possibly. The hallmark of PANS/PANDAS is sudden onset, often after illness, with multiple symptoms appearing together. If a child's OCD or anxiety appeared gradually over months or years, that pattern is less consistent with PANS/PANDAS. If it appeared in days, particularly after infection, the picture is worth a second look.

Yes, and the overlap is well documented in the research literature. PANS and PANDAS can absolutely occur in children with autism, and a subset of autistic children with sudden behavioral or developmental worsening have been shown to have underlying immune-mediated factors. The PANS Research Consortium has explicitly addressed the question of co-occurrence, and a growing body of work, including research by Dr. Susan Swedo (NIMH), Dr. Richard Frye, Dr. Madeleine Cunningham, and others, has documented immune dysregulation and neuroinflammatory findings in a meaningful subset of children on the autism spectrum.

The clue is the same one that anchors any PANS/PANDAS evaluation: a sudden change from this child's own baseline, often after infection or other immune event, rather than the gradual unfolding of autistic traits over development. If your child's autism profile has shifted abruptly, or if new neuropsychiatric symptoms (acute-onset OCD, severe food refusal, tics, rage, regression in previously held skills) appeared on top of a stable autism presentation, that pattern is worth investigating regardless of the autism diagnosis. An autism diagnosis does not exclude PANS or PANDAS, and in some cases the two coexist.