Neuroimmunology 2017: making progress over 20 years

In 1997, two prescient case reports described an encephalopathy associated with ovarian teratoma presenting with a psychiatric illness that responded to tumour resection.1,2 10 years later, Dalmau and colleagues3 first reported an association between this syndrome and antibodies against the NMDA receptor. NMDAR-antibody encephalitis is notable for a clinical-radiological paradox of often normal structural MRI but severe and disabling illness. In 2017, Peer and colleagues4 reported the largest functional imaging analysis of such patients to date.