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posted by martyb on Friday April 07 2017, @09:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the pain-in-the-gut dept.

Orally infecting mice with a human reovirus resulted in an immune response against gluten and led to symptoms of celiac disease in the rodents, researchers reported today (April 6) in Science. Reoviruses are prevalent in humans; while children are commonly infected with them, reoviruses are not known to cause disease in people. But the results of this mouse study suggest that a reovirus infection may spur development of celiac disease in certain individuals.

"It's been hypothesized for decades that virus infection can trigger autoimmune processes. This study provides an example of that phenomenon and some mechanistic insight into how this might work for celiac disease," said Herbert Virgin, a virologist at the University of Washington, who has collaborated with some of the study's authors but was not involved in the present work.

An inflammatory immune response develops in the guts of individuals with celiac disease when they ingest foods containing gluten, a protein found in wheat. People with celiac disease have a genetic predisposition to gluten intolerance, but prior epidemiological data provided hints that environmental factors, including viral infections, are also associated with initiation of the disorder.

Reovirus infection triggers inflammatory responses to dietary antigens and development of celiac disease (DOI: 10.1126/science.aah5298) (DX)


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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @04:05PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @04:05PM (#490310)

    i have hypothesized that ms may be due to an unknown viral infection in the brain. people always want to blame the immune system like it's just crazy but i see evidence to the contrary. just because researchers can't see the cause doesn't mean it's not there.

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  • (Score: 2) by Joe on Friday April 07 2017, @05:55PM

    by Joe (2583) on Friday April 07 2017, @05:55PM (#490393)

    The immune system doesn't just go crazy - there is a break-down of immunological tolerance (that may be triggered by an infection) that causes it to improperly recognize healthy tissue as something that needs to be destroyed. The "just because researchers can't see [it] doesn't mean it's not there" argument isn't particularly compelling in the case of a viral infection because there are multiple detection methods that are very sensitive and researchers have very thoroughly looked for such a cause.

    Perhaps the strongest evidence against direct viral-induced cellular death in MS are the immunosuppressive therapies (including hematopoietic stem cell transplants). Suppressing the immune system in the context of a lytic virus causing direct pathology would result in enhanced viral replication and tissue damage. We've discussed a recent clinical trial that provides strong evidence that T cells, in particular, seem to drive disease and that removing them can result in no MS relapses in ~70% of patients for at least 13 years.

    - Joe

    Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27291994 [nih.gov]
    Previous discussion: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/06/13/1038232 [soylentnews.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune_disease [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_tolerance [wikipedia.org]