Linking MS with Epstein Barr virus

[Bevo]

Prof Bill Robinson, an immunologist at Stanford University in California, was an EBV sceptic until a couple of years ago. “I was dismissive, everybody has EBV so there’s no way it can really cause MS.”

Now he’s not only a fully convinced convert, he thinks he can join the dots between the virus and the myelin sheath.

His study, published in the journal Nature, showed the myelin sheath suffers from mistaken identity and is attacked by a confused part of the immune system that thinks it is fighting EBV.

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The crucial piece of evidence has come from the US military, which takes blood samples from soldiers every two years. These are kept in the freezers of the Department of Defense Serum Repository and have proven to be a goldmine for research.

A team at Harvard University went looking through samples from 10 million people to establish the connection between EBV and multiple sclerosis.

Their study, published in the journal Science, found 955 people who were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, using the regular blood samples, they were able to chart the course of the disease.

“Individuals who were not infected with the Epstein-Barr virus virtually never get multiple sclerosis,” Prof Alberto Ascherio, from Harvard, told me.

“It’s only after Epstein-Barr virus infection that the risk of multiple sclerosis jumps up by over 30-fold.”

The team checked for other infections, such as cytomegalovirus, but only EBV had a crystal clear connection with the neurodegenerative disease.

The soldiers caught the virus. Then signs of injury to the brain - called neurofilament light polypeptide, which is essentially the rubble from damaged brain cells - started to appear in the blood. Then they were diagnosed with MS around five years after the infection.

Is a virus we all have causing multiple sclerosis?

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04432-7.epdf

[Bevo]

I had a drummer back in the early 90’s who got an acute version of Epstein-Barr Virus

He told me he had been touring around and living a little too fast, as I’ll put it
Started falling down at gigs having fits which got progressively worse

Finally ended up in a country hospital completely paralysed and couldn’t talk
It was pre-internet and the doctors were baffled
A visiting doctor from Sydney worked out it was EBV

After 6 months he finally moved his little finger
Took another 18 months of rehabilitation and walking around town on a frame to eventually come right

By the time I met him, he was perfectly normal again