As security guards held her down and hospital attendants put restraints on her wrists and ankles, the young woman pointed at one of them and shouted: “Don’t you see it? He’s a walker! He’s a walker!”

Her anguished claim stopped one of the guards in his tracks. He shook his head and said: “Oh my god, she thinks she’s in ‘The Walking Dead.’”

Indeed, the 22-year-old genuinely believed she was trapped in the zombie wasteland portrayed on the long-running AMC show.

Her terrifying predicament is told in the new book “A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain” (Norton, W.W & Company). Written by Dr Sara Manning, an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, it explores why certain cognitive diseases are caused by molecular abnormalities that can confound some medical professionals.

As Manning describes it, “the very molecules that make our brains work can also co-opt out personalities and destroy our ability to think.”

It took more than a week for doctors to recognize it, but the woman who was convinced she was living in an episode of “The Walking Dead” was being adversely affected by protein antibodies created by her own body as it fought an infection.

Lauren, as Manning calls her in the book, had fallen victim to a condition called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, the same type of inflammation of the nervous system made famous by the best-selling book “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness.”

The 2012 memoir, written by New York Post contributor Susannah Cahalan, put the little-known diagnosis on the map five years after it was first discovered by Dr. Josep Dalmau, an acclaimed neurologist formerly based at the same Philadelphia hospital as Manning.

Lauren’s symptoms developed in August 2016, less than a month after she’d graduated from college. Her 64-year-old mom, Kate, told The Post how Lauren seemed to be exhausted by the “stress” of her final exams and would often sleep late after watching TV in her room. (Kate asked to use a pseudonym to protect her daughter’s privacy.)

She said that Lauren had been introduced to “The Walking Dead” by a friend who urged her to “catch up” on the AMC series as quickly as she could. “I guess he wanted to discuss it with her,” the mom added.

Lauren would binge on two to three episodes at a time, burning through three seasons in a few nights and afternoons.

“Luckily, she didn’t get to the other seasons,” her mom said, “because really bad things happen.”

One day, Kate recalled, “She asked for breakfast, forgetting she’d already ate. Then she started repeating the same things every five minutes.”

Kate suspected her daughter was having an anxiety attack. After Lauren sank to the floor, as if in shock, Kate rushed her to the ER.

In “A Molecule Away from Madness,” Manning described how the attending physician tried to assess Lauren’s situation. He asked the standard neurological questions such as: “What state do you live in?” and “What year is it?” She answered each of them correctly.

But then “The Walking Dead” kicked in.

“Suddenly, as if occupied by a spirit, Lauren reached for the doctor’s chest and gripped his chest,” Manning wrote. “She thrust him across the room, then dug her fingernails into the arm of a startled nurse.”

It was all in her mind, but she was fighting for her life — just like the survivors in the show.

“She’d never been violent,” Kate told The Post about her daughter’s personality. “But she was extremely scared and in survival mode.”

The mom watched in horror as Lauren lived out the nightmare. Kate said the girl was “in a constant state of fear or flight” as she fought off imaginary attackers hunting for flesh.

She thought Kate was Rick Grimes, the main character in the series, and always spoke to her as such. Once, she told her: “OK, well, it was nice to meet with you, Rick,” adding: “I guess I’m just going to run out and try to shoot s–t. I’ve got to go because I got some walkers that are stuck to my arm.”

After a while, Kate decided to play along because Lauren would “get upset” if she didn’t “stay in character.”  As the days went by, the young woman continued to mistake her nurse for Rick’s wife, Maggie, or demand to see Dr. Herschel Green, another of the show’s characters.

The physicians were flummoxed as Lauren underwent a spinal tap and a succession of blood tests and brain scans, ruling out Seizures, strokes and infections.

In the end, it was Kate who managed to crack the code. The former medical assistant leaned on her research skills and searched for answers on the Internet — where she found the abstract of a study Dalmau had published about anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.  The mom was particularly interested in its association with ovarian tumors in women.

Manning told The Post that around half of those suffering from the neurological disease are found to have a tumor in their pelvic area.

“You have to keep looking for it,” the specialist said. “Even if it’s small, it can be big enough to cause this immune reaction [in the brain].”

Kate said she was frozen out when she asked Lauren’s doctor to test her spinal fluid for an autoimmune disorder and do a scan of her reproductive organs. She recalled: “It was like: ‘Yeah, lady, what do you know?’”

Undeterred, the mom managed to get Lauren transferred to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, where Manning was completing her residency.

There, the new set of nurses in Philadelphia told Kate about “Brain on Fire.”

“I read it from cover to cover,” said Kate, who later watched the 2018 film adaptation of Cahalan’s book, starring Chloë Grace Moretz. “Lauren had so many of Susannah’s symptoms.”

Meanwhile Manning’s co-workers used Dalmau’s diagnostic tools to find a tumor on Lauren’s right ovary. It had stimulated her immune system to produce millions of antibodies, which mistakenly attacked crucial receptors to her brain.

The fallout was similar to the one that occurs when people take the illegal hallucinogenic PCP. “Lauren hadn’t taken it [the drug],” Manning said, “but her body had created a protein that had the same effect.”

Remarkably, her condition was cured almost as soon as the tumor was removed. It was fitting that Lauren “escaped” from “The Walking Dead” on Oct. 31, 2016, three days after the surgery.

“She woke herself up and saw the date [of Halloween] on a board near her bed,” Kate said. “And, she was just like: ‘Where am I? What’s been happening?”

Cahalan’s account helped Lauren’s family understand the frightening condition and gave them hope that she would recover.

“Thankfully, Lauren was diagnosed much earlier than Susannah and I’m grateful that she [Cahalan] has raised awareness of the disease,” “It’s comforting for Lauren and me to know she isn’t alone.” (

Kate reckons it took around two years for Lauren, who didn’t recall her behavior, to completely “return to normal.” Now 27, she suffers occasional bouts of anxiety but is making strides as a fiction author.

But it’s unlikely she’ll be writing about zombies any time soon. She avoids the topic of horror and, as Kate said, “has never watched ‘The Walking Dead’ again.”  

The mom said Manning had told her about another patient who’d received the same diagnosis as Lauren. But that woman had been “stuck” inside the Disney movie “Frozen.”

“I thought to myself: ‘Boy, ‘The Walking Dead’ was probably the worst thing for my daughter to have been watching before this all happened.”