Comment by mjhay
2 years ago
Similarly, there is now extemely strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr is causal in multiple sclerosis. The vast majority of people are infected with EB, with most never having symptoms. However, a nonsignificant minority aren't. A large-scale study of data covering 10 million US military service people found that those infected with EB were 32 times more likely to develop MS.
Epstein-Barr has long been thought to be a culprit in everything from MS to dementia to especially CFS. But that's a real problem: there are no antivirals developed that are particularly effective against it. EBV research has been a backwater in medicine.
> EBV research has been a backwater in medicine
Truth. I moderate a forum for people suffering from Mononucleosis and the overwhelming feeling is abandonment and fear. Granted there's some inverse survivorship bias -- people who feel well supported and educated by the medical system usually don't post in support groups -- but it's so hard seeing so many people suffering for so long (SO LONG -- years of fatigue and malaise, in many cases) for something that has basically no first-line therapy.
Academic disciplines and medical research being famously kind to disabled people entering them too, right?
With most of these patients living decades after diagnosis, you would imagine that a reasonable chunk of them would give the rest of their life to researching a cure for their disease.
Yet, while it seems common to do charity awareness fundraisers at marathons, it does not seem common for people to go learn biochemistry and work on solving the problem directly.
Compare that to tech, where a huge chunk of the people here have probably written a computer program to solve some itch of theirs. Saying "I'm doing a charity fundraiser to fix the print preview bug in libreoffice" would be crazy.
I wonder if perhaps these people all have so little useful productivity left that it isn't even worth starting to learn biochemistry?
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>there are no antivirals developed that are particularly effective against it.
What happened to the research into DRACOs? A few years ago I kept hearing about them, but they seemed to vanish.
Is there any evidence of this? I have seen the data but it seems also likely that the same immune issues that cause ms could cause a lapse of resistance to eb.
Antivirals probably won’t help as most infections are silent, a vaccine is needed. Moderna is working on one.
For anyone else reading, EBV is the virus behind mononucleosis.
ahhhh I'm in danger.
We all are.
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Can confirm, I have MS and I got EBV about a decade before MS took me down…. It’s crazy what a tiny little virus can do.
EBV reactivation also plays a major role in ME/CFS, a condition that can affect people almost as severely as MS, but at any age. HHV-6 and 7 infections have also been implicated.
The paper mjhay refers to: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj8222
EB vs non-EB history also seems to imply distinct but similar conditions.
The evidence implicating EBV in MS is not nearly as strong as this causal evidence.
It's incredibly strong evidence that it's a required but not sufficient condition. I've seen professionals have serious suspicions that the single EBV-negative MS case from the study [1] OP mentioned was a false negative, but apparently it's not easy to confirm.
A single EBV-negative MS case. While there were 955 MS cases that developed in the 0.5M that were EBV-negative at the start of military service. You'd expect there to be about 50. That's pretty compelling evidence.
[1] https://www.usmedicine.com/clinical-topics/multiple-sclerosi...