Oh Halloween... It's the season for zombies, vampires, and creepy things alike.
In light of this theme, I will cover some spooky science news this week!

To start off, the "walking dead" is real. Really.

We've all heard folks describe themselves as feeling "zombie-like," but they know they're actually alive. On the other hand, patients suffering from Cotard's Syndrome are convinced that they are the "walking dead."

In the late nineteenth century, French neurologist Jules Cotard recorded his experience with a patient he dubbed "Mademoiselle X." She believed that she was dead, refused to eat, and eventually died from starvation. Cotard's patient's case was widely disseminated and that's how the "walking dead" syndrome became known as Cotard's Syndrome.

This mysterious syndrome made headlines recently when a publication in The Journal of the Neurological Sciences implicated a connection between Cotard's Syndrome and an antiviral commonly prescribed for cold sores and herpes called aciclovir. After scouring through Swedish medical records, the authors found that all but one of the Cotard's cases involved patients with renal failure who were prescribed aciclovir. In a healthy individual, drugs are processed by the body, byproducts are filtered from the blood by the kidneys, and the waste is excreted. With poor kidney function, drug metabolites accumulate in the body and can lead to complications. Because 6 of the 7 Cotard's patients in this study had both renal failure and high blood serum levels of the aciclovir byproduct CMMG, the authors speculate that accumulation of CMMG is responsible for the psychological symptoms. For these patients, dialysis treatments or a reduced dosage was sufficient to eliminate the symptoms.

Some cases, such as Mademoiselle X's cannot be explained by aciclovir metabolites. Much remains to be learned about this unusual syndrome.