PANS stands for Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome and PANDAS stands for Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal infections. PANDAS is actually the one and only subset of PANS, but there may be more discovered in the future.
The two are so similar and nearly identical that they are almost always grouped together with a ‘/’ in between them. But it is important to understand that the ‘/’ is there for a reason. They are two different medical diagnoses with a couple distinct differences.
The first main difference between the two is actually what they officially are. PANS is a syndrome and PANDAS is a disorder, meaning that PANS does not have a specified cause but PANDAS does. The second main difference is the age of onset. PANS has no age limitation, but symptoms usually do occur during the grade-school years, while PANDAS requires symptoms prior to puberty. More about this second main difference in the Diagnosis section.
See all sources in the Sources section.