8 ms·
Here's a link to the article [0]. Just a bit of background - 95% of humans will experience infection with EBV at some point in their lives. Once you're infect
by dm319 5y ago
Here's a link to the article [0].
Just a bit of background - 95% of humans will experience infection with EBV at some point in their lives. Once you're infected, it remains latent, only flaring up in particular circumstances. MS is an autoimmune disease, like many others, and this paper does not imply that EBV directly causes MS. Obviously, as so many more people have EBV than have MS, EBV infection does not completely explain why people get MS.
Just to put a small caveat to the paper. The comparison is to EBV 'seronegative' population - this is a minority of people (i.e. people who do not have evidence of being infected with EBV). You could argue this is an 'unusual' population in the first place and there's something about them that provides protection from MS.
Another point is that EBV is a risk factor, there are other risk factors known too. I think the key to understanding a lot of autoimmune diseases is to understand how our adaptive immune system works. Our immune response is a very complex cell-to-cell interaction between millions of cells all with different roles, and how the immune system decides whether something is a threat or not is not, and how to respond to it, is not yet clear.
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj8222 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj8222
- user90349083 5y agoFor anyone dealing with an acute bout of Epstein-Barr Virus, I used 3 teaspoons a day of monolaurin for three weeks to kick it. Research monolaurin, it's fascinating stuff as an antiviral and I can personally attest to its effectiveness.
- csdvrx 5y agoOr get actual antivirals. IIRC the same thing that's prescribed for HSV works on EBV
- user90349083 5y agoSome people prefer God's medicine to man's medicine. To each his own
- taneq 5y agoIf God is what it says on the tin then man's medicine is God's medicine. In fact if anything in this world isn't God's then God isn't both omniscient and omnipotent.
- user90349083 5y agoMonolaurin is found in human breast milk and coconuts. Acyclovir and Ganciclovir were synthesized by humans in a lab
- danachow 5y agoAcyclovir is shown to decrease viral replication in vivo. There is no such evidence for monolaurin. So there’s that.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoHuman breast milk is also synthesised by humans! But, more seriously, don't you believe human medicine to be inspired by God? What about other human activity?
- dtech 5y agoI never understood this argument. If God was against these medicines, why would He allow them to exist?...
- birdyrooster 5y agoI guess titling the article "Multiple Sclerosis Causality" and then immediately going into EBV correlation seems like implication to me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hda111 5y agoHad a similar thought when reading the headline. It’s like saying drinking water causes MS.
- philshem 5y ago100.0% of people consume H2O. There is no control group.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoI think this is may be one reason they used CMV infection as a control. Unless you think that the people who don't get CMV are not special, but the ones who don't get EBV are...
- dm319 5y agoYes that's a good point.
- dekhn 5y agoAt least part of the adaptive immune system is implemented in the thymus. As an infant, the thymus makes examples of nearly every type of cell in the body and uses it as negative labelled examples to tune the false positive detector so it doesn't identify self as threat. From an information theory perspective, that's pretty extraordinary (you don't normally expect differentiated cells in an organ to act like cells from another organ). Another part of the adaptive immune system randomly shuffles different regions of genes together to produce enormous diversity (searching for a rare example of something that "works"), then picks the proteins from those genes that work best and distributes them throughout the body. Pretty amazing stuff.
- whatshisface 5y agoWhat's the connection to information theory?
- dekhn 5y agosorry, I shouldn't have thrown that in there.
- d0mine 5y agoOn information theory [unrelated to the discussion]: both digital information (stored in DNA --4-letters) and analog information (epigenome) can be manipulated for various effects e.g., "Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To" by Sinclair https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N4C6LGR/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N4C6LGR/
- dm319 5y agoYes, it's really fascinating stuff. Just to add to that, cells must present a continuous sample of their proteasome on the cell surface in the form of a short peptide 9-12 amino acids long. T cells will recognise when the cell is producing protein it shouldn't be (i.e. because it became cancerous or infected with a virus), even if only one amino acid is incorrect. It learns this in the thymus, which has a bizarre gene called AIRE which switches on genes from all over the body, essentially creating a representation of the entire body in the thymus gland as a sort of sandbox before they are let out. However, we don't have enough T cells to recognise every possible sequence of 11 amino acids (which would weigh around 1.5 tons), so T cells must be so-called 'cross-reactive'[1]. And therefore other factors must go into how T cells respond to abnormalities. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nri3279 https://www.nature.com/articles/nri3279
- moneywoes 5y agoAs someone with an autoimmune disease, is there anything I can do to prevent getting more? Iirc having one is a risk factor for others
- dm319 5y agoI'm afraid this is out of my scope of understanding. Once the immune system determines something is non-self, the immune system can often self-propagate the response. It eventually enters a tolerance phase where it aims to just 'control' the threat. There are some known modulators of the immune system, but the medical forms can be especially blunt tools (i.e. steroids). Locally directed treatment is better, and maybe in the future we'll have specially crafted cells that can inhibit a specific response for particular antigens. There is a long and slightly-controversial link between stress (and lots of other environmental factors) affecting the immune system. I'm not familiar with the literature.
- manwe150 5y agoI recently learned (also from HN) that wild-type measles can often destroy your bodies pre-existing immunities to most past threats. I wonder if we will someday be able to trigger a similar effect with a synthetic virus, wiping the immune memory, then re-vaccinate to get back immunity afterwards. But it is practically just science fiction stuff now, as far as I know.
- mpreda 5y ago[this is not medical advice] Some things that may modulate the immune system are: vitamin D3, intestinal worms, exercise, diet / fasting, and gradual stimulation of the immune response ("desensitisation").
- johnisgood 5y agoPropolis and Cinnamomum verum are great immunomodulators for autoimmune diseases. Echinacea is sold as an immune system booster, and it is a firm nope.
- 5y ago