Multiple Sclerosis or MS Is Caused By A Virus

[Music] wow [Music] hey welcome to another episode of talking with docs i'm dr paul zalzo i'm dr brad weaning okay we've got a cool topic today yeah it's very interesting um it's trying to hot off the medical press i'm not sure why the media hasn't broken this story yet but um i think because it's drowned out by the noise from another medical story yeah this was a great scientific journal article that we both read what'd you think of it i think it was amazing and uh certainly the potential for the future is very exciting yeah so the topic was ms yeah multiple sclerosis yep which is a neurologic disease yeah demyelinating disease that we don't really know much about it's limited information as far as why you get it how it progresses how to diagnose it and even how to treat it unfortunately yeah there's really no cure for it no well it turns out that ms is actually and type of infectious disease yeah so there's an article in a journal called science a very reputable journal just this month that had a massive study a 20-year study where they looked at 10 million american military recruits and followed them for 20 years all of these military recruits at the beginning of their military career had given some blood samples to test for hiv yeah mandatory every two years i didn't know that yeah so uh they they kept those blood samples and this group of researchers looked at it and looked for a virus called the epstein-barr virus right so what did most people most people wouldn't have heard of epstein-barr but they might have heard one of the famous diseases that it causes it's a kissing disease so mono paul would probably say he didn't get in high school he'd complain that high school was hard on him but yeah mononucleosis or the kissing disease wasn't exposed because it was passed by saliva and interestingly epstein-barr virus is everywhere they estimate that up to 95 of people actually have had some type of exposure so if all of our blood is tested 19 out of 20 of us would test positive for evidence of previous or active epstein-barr infection right so now you're probably wondering what do epstein-barr mono and ms have in common right so what did they find paul it turns out that just about everybody who they followed who developed ms which occurs in about one in ten thousand of the time in this study yep everybody who got ms had the epstein-barr virus at some point in their life right if you didn't have epstein-barr you didn't get ms right and even they had some studies where the blood test was originally negative and then they went through something called serial conversion where then your blood becomes positive so the first sample was negative and then it became positive later on and it was everyone except one of these it was up to 900 people out of the 10 million had ms and one person hadn't and they weren't exactly they didn't have a very good expense for that one person there was one person who uh developed mass and didn't have epstein-barr virus however they think there may have been an error or they think that person may have actually had it and it wasn't picked up so the vast majority of the time if you had if you got ms you had the epstein-barr virus but it only goes in that direction it doesn't go in the other direction if you have epstein-barr virus it doesn't mean you're going to get ms but you can't get ms if you don't have the epstein-barr virus that's right so then people are going to be like well that really doesn't help us very much if everybody has epstein-barr and a small percentage of ms how does this help us okay so it helps us in a couple of ways a couple of very significant ways yes one we can guide treatment of ms knowing that its underlying cause is the epstein-barr virus you've got the virus when you were younger it stays late in your body and then comes out later and causes ms so you can guide your treatment of ms now that you know the etiology or the cause of the ms that's one but the other way right because a lot of the treatments now are more generalized treatments and then this way if we can specifically attack with a specific antiviral for epstein-barr that has a higher chance of being effective but way more i think way more exciting um unless you have ms yeah exciting equally exciting is the fact that you may be able to prevent it with a vaccine if you could have a vaccine that could eliminate people from getting epstein-barr it would make sense then that we could maybe not eliminate but you know drastically reduced the incidence of multiple scores which is amazing like polio right polio is sort of a infectious disease that has musculoskeletal implications right a paralyzing disease similar to ms in that you have an infectious disease that causes musculoskeletal neurologic things we got rid of that with a vaccine yeah the polio virus is quite different from the epstein-barr marsh polio virus comes in through the gi tract epstein-barr through bodily fluids but the same idea if you vaccinate against it you can eradicate it one day it's super exciting and obviously the timeline from from what this article showed to a vaccine is is even indeterminate i don't even know but it but it certainly is some promise in an area for a long time that didn't have much so i think some of the anti-vaxxers might get nervous now or comment or be upset but it's tricky and well i to be honest that would provide a study oh yeah right yeah it would provide its own state because you can't even in this article they mentioned you can't really do a randomized controlled trial it's just not practical so this was the best way to have a massive number of people and they compare them to people that didn't have the virus and um yeah it's a really really exciting piece of literature yeah so you might be seeing that in the media soon in your popular media outlets starting to talk about uh ms being an infectious disease and you're going to be in the know before all of your friends yeah and infectious diseases really haven't they had their time in the line right over the last time i'd leave it to another branch how about orthopedic surgery come on give us some frontal page headlines no back to the infectious disease specialists now ms there you go but very exciting and if you like this video please like it subscribe to our channel and remember you are in charge of your own health we'll see you next time

Channel: Talking With Docs

Views: 99,342

Keywords: MS, multiple sclerosis, mono, epstein-barr, virus, infectious disease

Id: 0gw28QMLbH4

Length: 6min 6sec (366 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022