In the Loop: Caring Canines is ‘love at first sight’ for patients

After a career as a physician in Minneapolis, Denise Krivach, M.D., was looking forward to spending her retirement years in the solitude of the Montana backcountry. As the Star Tribune reports, however, those plans abruptly changed when she woke up one day to find her body "non-functional." Local doctors initially diagnosed her with early onset dementia, but the Strib reports the former physician "rejected" that diagnosis and came to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion.

"After months of testing" at Mayo's Rochester campus, Denise's doubts about her diagnosis were confirmed. Doctors told her she did not have dementia but instead was suffering from autoimmune encephalitis — a diagnosis that, in short, meant "her immune system was attacking her brain," the newspaper reports. Read the rest of the story.
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This story originally appeared on the In the Loop blog.