#i know this wont help me
Multiple Sclerosis Is Likely Caused by a Virus, Finds Study of 10 Million Military Personnel
Aaaaaah, this is such important and good news.
As someone with complex health needs, it really is heartening to finally see so much progress being made with research and the results finally confirming what many of us suspected: that our complex ailments are the result of viral infection.
Still an absolute mother fucker for those affected, but still, progress!!
Please open and read the article, because the headline doesn’t do the results justice at all:
Becoming EBV-positive resulted in a 32-fold increased risk of later developing MS as opposed to remaining EBV-negative. The next-strongest known risk factor for MS is having a set of genes that encode for proteins found of the surface of certain immune cells. People with a particular set of these immune cells, who have a homozygous genotype for the HLA-DR15 allele, have a threefold increased risk of MS.
That is. Do you know how ludicrously strong a result that is. And they did some clever analysis to prove that it was EBV (mononucleosis/glandular fever) rather than any confounders:
Ascherio’s team examined antibodies against cytomegalovirus, another saliva-borne virus that has also infected most of the world’s population, to serve as a negative control. Individuals who were CMV-negative at their first sample showed no increased risk of MS if they later became CMV-positive.
MS is thought to have a long prodromal phase, meaning the disease could affect the immune system years before symptom onset and diagnosis. Could the EBV-MS relationship be reversed? Perhaps people who have MS but don’t yet show symptoms are more likely to develop an infection such as EBV. To rule this out, Ascherio’s team looked at 30 MS patients, and 30 healthy controls. They used a search tool called VirScan that enables the detection of any antibody raised against any protein in any of the ~200 viruses known to infect humans. The only virus to show significantly increased presence in MS cases was EBV.
Like, I have a degree in statistics, and I am comfortable with saying that this paper has shown that EBV causes MS. And in excellent concurrent news, Moderna has just started phase 1 trials of an mRNA vaccine against EBV! The future is now!
