This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Community: Knowledge & Support

I've never understood the EBV connection for the following reason...

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/ebv.htm

Pcakes, same here. Marc posted this the other day though:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21757537

Thanks Cece.. so if you have had both type I and type II would you have had mono twice?.. or am I thinking too simply? (pretty sure that's bad grammar) But then this concept seems simple. The EBV question is not new? Is the ability to test and seperate the two strains new?

I'm more of the camp that EBV and other viral antibodies exacerbate MS/CCSVI via endothelial dysfunction. Which is why researchers find associations with MS and EBV, Herpes zoster, H-pylori, CpN and other viral and bacterial infectious agents. How can all of these infectious agents be related to MS? Which one is truly causative? It seems to change from week to week, depending on which research paper one reads. Maybe they all contribute via endothelial dysfunction and inflammation.....


http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/conte ... /45/8/1219
cheer

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Husband dx RRMS 3/07
dx dual jugular vein stenosis (CCSVI) 4/09
dual stents placed 5/09
CCSVI in MS

See.. now THAT makes sense!

Yes, that makes sense.

I remember feeling like we had a thousand puzzle pieces of MS. Everything worked a little to help MS or was a minor player in making it worse. Nothing fit together.

CCSVI and the endothelium...the big missing puzzle pieces at the center of the puzzle....

based on damaging veins you will have the missing mechanism for the cause and effect of MS.

Just to clear up one point about EBV that often leads to confusion, most people who are infected with the virus never had Mono. Often the infection can show up as a bad cold, or be completely asymptomatic.

To me, the most intriguing theory regarding why the herpes viruses are connected with MS and some other "autoimmune" diseases is that the presence of such "smoldering" infections reactivates normally dormant pieces of ancient retroviral DNA that are resident in the human genome.

Hard as it is to believe, most of the human genome (over 90%) has nothing to do with making humans. Some of it is made up of the remnants of retroviruses that at some point in our evolutionary past were infectious, and in some cases deadly, but eventually simply became part of human DNA.

Retroviruses do their dirty work by inserting their genes into the DNA of the cells they infect, and our evolutionary response to this has been to incorporate them into the human genome, as inactivated genes. Eventually, this is what will probably happen with HIV, after several thousand years.

Anyway, there is growing evidence that in some humans with genetic predisposition, an infection of viruses in the herpes family actually activates some of this ancient viral genes in our own DNA, causing our own cells to express proteins that basically make the immune system go cannibal.

Here's an absolutely fascinating article on this phenomenon, entitled "The Insanity Virus". The title refers to schizophrenia, which also seems to be subject to this phenomenon, but there is much discussion of MS in the article as well…

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03 ... nity-virus

This is really a must-read…

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Marc
www.wheelchairkamikaze.com

I read it. Interesting stuff. I hope the research studies going on in Switzerland on mice w/ms, are really mice w/ms, not eae.

Review the EBV and MS link research at

http://www.msrc.co.uk/index.cfm/fuseact ... pageid/707

Since I began to read about MS, I have been quite interested about blood-brain-barrier. Many research papers say that disruption of BBB is "hallmark of disease", very key part of MS process. I found this interesting paper, which says that EBV virus "... can infect human BBB cells leading to increased production of pro-inflammatory mediators that result in immune cell adherence.."



So bbb in MS-patients is in bad enviroment --> abnormal blood flow & activated viruses --> dysfunction?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20826008

On the other hand.. you could think that reduction with blood flow, would make CNS quite vulnerable target, to opportunistic viruses?

Just to add my anecdotal subjective $0.02 worth, I had symptoms, including an event that sent me shopping around the neurologists in town, and it went away, and a couple of others, that didn't. Then I had a terrible bad flu where I was in bed for about three weeks and my friend Dr. Bob called me a very sick puppy. Could have been an EBV reinfection: it was in my throat something bad. I started on symmetrel once I was diagnosed, and I have been disabled about 7 years now, and unable to walk without walker. But I haven't had the flu in many years. Now I seldom even get colds, since on symmetrel. Plus I have flu shots every year. And Canada, this glorious nation, I believe still uses mercury in flu shots. So who could tell anything from anything?

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"Try - Just A Little Bit Harder" - Janis Joplin
CCSVI procedure Albany Aug 2010
'_MS' is over - if you want it
Patients sans/without patience

That would work well for the species, if we had a mechanism for making viral DNA in our genome inactive (perhaps part of that is how APCs work?) but we need something that works sooner than that, preferably on the individual...

_________________
"Try - Just A Little Bit Harder" - Janis Joplin
CCSVI procedure Albany Aug 2010
'_MS' is over - if you want it
Patients sans/without patience

Watched an interesting movie, think it was called "Feed Your Brain", about the lack of nutrition in our diet and Dr. Hoffer who treated his schizophrenia patients with niacin and got fabulous results. Wonder if the same could be said of MS patients and niacin, could niacin combat ebv?