--- title: "Mass General Brigham will close one of America’s few PANDAS clinics, and parents are fighting back" description: "Hundreds of children treated for a contested neuropsychiatric illness face losing their doctors in January, as advocates ask the attorney general to intervene" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-25T18:47:33.630Z modified: 2026-10-26T11:23:38Z url: https://rews.cc/a/mass-general-brigham-will-close-one-of-america-s-few-pandas--321786 language: en tags: ["health", "insurance", "psychology", "pediatrics", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Mass General Brigham will close one of America’s few PANDAS clinics, and parents are fighting back *Hundreds of children treated for a contested neuropsychiatric illness face losing their doctors in January, as advocates ask the attorney general to intervene* By Jan Sokol · October 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/mass-general-brigham-will-close-one-of-america-s-few-pandas--321786 ## In brief - Mass General Brigham told families in August it will close its PANS/PANDAS program in January - The program at MGB for Children is one of under 10 such multidisciplinary clinics in the US - MGB says it lacks the multidisciplinary services to meet national clinical standards safely - A Massachusetts advocacy group asked the attorney general for an independent review, citing possible patient abandonment - The AAP calls PANS ‘likely a valid diagnosis’ but urges more research; Massachusetts law requires insurance coverage In Boston, in a state whose law orders insurers to pay for the treatment, one of the largest hospital systems in America has decided it can no longer safely offer it. Mass General Brigham told families in August that its program for children with PANDAS and PANS — rare disorders in which a child’s mind appears to change overnight, after a strep infection or another immune insult — will shut its doors in January, [the Boston Globe reported](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/25/metro/pandas-pans-mgb-clinic-closure/). The program at Mass General Brigham for Children is one of fewer than ten multidisciplinary clinics in the country treating the disorder, according to the PANDAS Physicians Network, a nonprofit-affiliated group. Hundreds of patients have passed through it since it began in 2013, built for many years around two doctors: Mark Pasternack, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, and Kyle Williams, a psychiatrist. The hospital says the closure followed a “careful review” of its clinical model. “We do not have the multidisciplinary services needed to safely sustain a full PANS/PANDAS program that meets national clinical standards of care,” its statement reads. It promises to help families find alternatives. The families are not reassured. A Massachusetts-based PANS/PANDAS advocacy group has written to the state attorney general’s office, saying the hospital has not given clear answers and asking for an independent review of the closure plan — raising, in the letter, the question of whether the decision amounts to patient abandonment. MGB’s reply was flat: “The facts do not support what’s been claimed in the letter.” ## The child who woke up someone else The syndrome has unsettled medicine since 1998, when a landmark paper described fifty children who developed sudden, severe obsessive-compulsive behavior and tics after infection with the strep-throat bacterium. Later research, the Globe notes, has tied the condition to other triggers — flu, COVID-19, immune disruptions, some environmental exposures. The onset is the signature. Jennifer Frankovich, director of Stanford’s Immune Behavioral Health Clinic & Research Program, told the paper the defining feature is speed: a child may develop several severe symptoms over hours or a few days, unlike the gradual course of most psychiatric illness. Some research points to an abnormal immune response producing inflammation in body and brain; antibodies made against strep, Frankovich said, can mistakenly react with parts of the brain involved in movement, behavior and emotion. Jennifer Vitelli of Marshfield remembers the morning her nine-year-old son woke up a different child. He spoke in an unsettling baby voice; the boy who had just read through all the Harry Potter books could no longer read or add two numbers, could not brush his teeth or tie his shoes. “My husband and I were absolutely terrified,” she said. Doctors suggested the ordinary catalog of childhood psychiatric conditions. “He became literally a shell of the child that he was,” she said. He was eventually diagnosed with PANDAS — and treated at MGB. The numbers are guesses wearing the clothes of data. Frankovich cites a conservative estimate, drawn from a 2023 peer-reviewed study of medical records: at least 3,400 new American cases a year, roughly 170,000 people living with the condition. Yujuan (Julia) Zhang, a pediatric rheumatologist at Tufts Medical Center, believes it is underdiagnosed; she alone has seen more than 580 patients in two years. “Based on what we have seen, it seems anything that can potentially trigger \[an\] immune response might be causing a PANS/PANDAS flare,” she said. “It’s very hard to predict.” There are no FDA-approved diagnostic tests. Treatment means attacking the trigger first if it remains — antibiotics, anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen — and, in severe cases, infusions of healthy antibodies known as intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG, alongside therapy and psychiatric medication. Yet the American Academy of Pediatrics, while calling PANS “likely a valid diagnosis” in a recent clinical report and treating PANDAS as a subset of it, says more research is needed and has cautioned about widely used treatments. Massachusetts law nonetheless requires insurers to cover care for both conditions, including the very treatments the AAP questioned. The state has legislated certainty where science still withholds it. ## Fifteen thousand dollars on a credit card It is tempting, from a desk in a ministry or a boardroom, to see a program closure as a line item corrected. The history of these families suggests otherwise: it is a map of borders crossed in desperation. Sick children are commonly routed first to psychiatric services, parents and providers say, because much of the medical profession is unfamiliar with the diagnosis or skeptical of it. “It’s just challenging for the medical community to think patients with a medical condition actually can present with psychiatric symptoms,” Zhang said. Kim Panton of Duxbury learned the word PANS from a psychiatric nurse practitioner, after her son Taite — already diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD and depression, and a year into a cocktail of psychiatric medications that was not working — woke up with uncontrollable full-body tics. “This is like a sci-fi movie,” Panton, 58, recalled thinking. Antibiotics stopped the tics within a day. The nurse practitioner urged IVIG. MGB’s waitlist was too long. The family flew to Washington, D.C., to an out-of-network physician; the treatment cost $15,000, paid on a credit card without hesitation. “Weeks after that, we had our son back,” she said. When the family finally reached Dr. Pasternack at MGB, insurance covered the infusions and travel ended. “It changed everything for us.” Taite went on to run cross country in high school, and to win mountain-bike titles across New England. When a flare came last August, he was treated with IVIG at home. > The treatment saved me. If I didn’t have that, I’d be on the streets or I’d be in a psychiatric intake unit. That is Taite Panton, now 21, a student at the University of New Hampshire. Of the illness itself he says: “I don’t want to go back to the way I was. It’s like you’re possessed. You’re taken over by something.” In New England, the remaining doors are few: some providers at Tufts Medical Center, care at Dartmouth, independent pediatricians, psychiatrists and nurse practitioners. In January, one more door — in Boston, at one of the richest hospital systems in the country — is scheduled to close, and several hundred families are still waiting for a reason they can accept.