by marcstck » Sat Apr 04, 2009 4:45 pm
I've come to view the triggering of the MS disease process in terms of a car engine. In order to get the engine to turn over, you must have a sufficient amount of gasoline, working spark plugs, and keys to the ignition. Without all three of these things working in coordination, the engine simply won't start.
Relating this to MS, if you imagine the "keys" to be a genetic predisposition, the "gasoline" to be a viral or toxic trigger, and the "spark plugs" to the some other environmental factor/trigger, you need this combination of these elements working in concert to ignite the MS disease process. Once that process is running, though, I believe it takes on a life of its own, and can continue independent of any of the triggering factors, unlike a car engine, which, if the gasoline runs out or the sparkplugs stop functioning will cease to operate.
My own pet theory is that normally dormant bits of ancient retroviral DNA that have become part of the genome of susceptible humans (and many such bits of retroviral DNA have made their way into the human genome through the millennia) get switched "on" in the presence of a combination of triggering elements, and this aberrant active retroviral DNA gets recognized by our immune systems as an invader, and sets off the immune cascade that's come to be known as "autoimmunity". There was a very interesting paper out of Tufts University last summer that outlined just this postulate, and linked it to HHV-6...