Your child cannot describe what changed. Your notes can.
A PANS tracker to fill in and take to your GP. What changed and when, what came before it, a daily flare log, and the same-day red flags. Three pages, built around what clinicians actually ask for.
Where should we send it?
Three pages, free.
- Symptom groups from the 2015 consensus criteria
- Written to support your GP, not to replace them
- A minute a day once it is going
What is in the tracker
Three pages. The history on the first, the daily log on the second, and progress on the third.
What changed, and what came before
- Fourteen tick boxes covering what is new or much worse, from rituals and food refusal to handwriting, sensory changes, tics and wetting
- A prompt for the specific worry behind food refusal, since choking, vomiting, contamination and texture point in different directions
- A table for the illness or exposure that came before it, and anyone else at home who was unwell
- Family history, and a handwriting and drawing sample to take once when well and once during a flare
The log, and whether it is improving
- A 28 day flare log scored nought to three, with sleep, eating and a notes column for stress, damp and missed medicines
- A weekly check-in on their three hardest symptoms, plus how close to their usual self they are out of ten
- A flare summary, because progress shows up as flares that come less often, stay smaller and settle faster
- The same-day red flags, with the numbers to call, and a box for the day they get sick without a flare
She was fine, and then over a weekend she was not.
PANS, paediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, is when OCD, anxiety, food refusal or other large changes in behaviour appear after an infection or another immune challenge. The onset is the part parents remember most clearly, and the part that is hardest to convey in a fifteen minute appointment months later.
Children often cannot describe their own symptoms. They do not know that the handwriting has changed, or that the rituals started the week after the sore throat. What they can tell you on a given day is also coloured by how that day is going.
So the notes do the remembering. Dates, what came before, what got worse, and whether this flare was smaller than the last one. That pattern is what a clinician works from, and it is very hard to reconstruct from memory once you are a year in.
Why we made it
Parents arrive with a story they have told many times and a pile of detail that has been lost along the way. The tracker holds the detail, so appointments start from the pattern rather than from trying to recall when it began.
The symptom groups follow the 2015 clinical evaluation consensus published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, so the categories match the ones a clinician assessing your child will be working through.
Our team supports children with PANS every week. This tracker supports an assessment by your GP and other practitioners rather than standing in for one, and nothing in it is a diagnosis.
The last page carries the situations that need help the same day, with the numbers to call. Read that page before you need it.
Send me the tracker
Free, three pages.
General information only, and not a diagnosis or individual advice. This tracker supports an assessment by your GP and other practitioners. Symptom groups are based on Chang K et al. 2015, Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology. If you are worried about your child's immediate safety, contact your GP or emergency department the same day, or call 000. © The Family Naturopath, The KAN Clinic.