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posted by janrinok on Sunday January 16 2022, @08:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-day-we-will-have-a-cure-for-it... dept.

A very common virus may be the trigger for multiple sclerosis:

Evidence is mounting that a garden-variety virus that sometimes causes mono in teens is the underlying cause of multiple sclerosis, a rare neurological disease in which the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, stripping away protective insulation around nerve cells, called myelin.

It's still unclear how exactly the virus—the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)—may trigger MS and why MS develops in a tiny fraction of people. About 95 percent of adults have been infected with EBV, which often strikes in childhood. MS, meanwhile, often develops between the ages of 20 and 40 and is estimated to affect around one million people in the US. Yet, years of evidence have consistently pointed to links between the childhood virus and the chronic demyelinating disease later in life.

With a study published today in Science, the link is stronger than ever, and outside experts say the new findings offer further "compelling" evidence that EBV isn't just connected to MS; it's an essential trigger for the disease. The study found, among other things, that people had a 32-fold increase in risk of developing MS following an EBV infection in early adulthood.

"It's a great paper," Dr. Ruth Dobson, a preventive neurology professor and MS expert at Queen Mary University of London, told Ars in an interview. "The evidence just adds up and adds up and adds up... Whilst we don't understand biologically how EBV drives MS and we think about causation theories, really we have the rest of the building blocks in place," said Dobson, who was not involved in the new Science study. "It's another piece of evidence that really solidifies this theory" that EBV triggers MS.

[...] For the study, researchers led by Harvard neuroepidemiologist Dr. Kjetil Bjornevik mined an exceptionally rich repository of blood serum samples taken from a cohort of more than 10 million active-duty military personnel between 1993 and 2013.

[...] In the cohort, there were 801 members who developed MS and had banked up to three serum samples prior to their diagnosis. This gave the researchers the unique opportunity to go back in time and examine serum samples from MS patients years before they developed the disease. The researchers could also compare samples from the 801 MS patients to samples from 1,566 cohort members who did not develop MS and could serve as controls.

Of the 801 people who developed MS, all but one had antibodies indicating an EBV infection by the time of their MS diagnosis. And most of those EBV infections occurred earlier in their lives. At the start of the 20-year period, only 35 of the 801 MS patients started out as negative for EBV. By the end of the period, 34 of those 35 developed anti-EBV antibodies—aka seroconverted—prior to their diagnosis.

Journal Reference:
Kjetil Bjornevik, Marianna Cortese, Brian C. Healy, et al. Longitudinal analysis reveals high prevalence of Epstein-Barr virus associated with multiple sclerosis, Science (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj8222)


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  • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday January 16 2022, @09:10PM

    by crafoo (6639) on Sunday January 16 2022, @09:10PM (#1213250)

    MS is a horrible disease. I watched a co-worker get hit with it. Despair was mostly what he commented on. He had some plans for life and that had all been trashed due to MS.

    This seems like great news. I hope they develop better treatments or even a cure soon. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

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