multiple sclerosis produces antibodies that can be detected in the blood before the first symptoms appear disease, which opens up promising possibilities for treating this disease, which affects 1.8 million people worldwideAccording to the World Health Organization.
Scientists University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) discovered the precursor in the blood of some people who later developed the disease described in a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine.
In about In 1 in 10 cases of multiple sclerosis, the body begins to produce a characteristic set of antibodies. Researchers noticed that against their own proteins years before symptoms appeared.
These autoantibodies appear to bind to both human cells and common pathogens, possibly explaining the immune attacks on the brain and spinal cord that characterize the disease and can lead to a devastating loss of motor control, including the ability to walk.
The scientists hope that the autoantibodies they discovered could one day be detected using a simple blood test.which would give patients greater benefits when receiving treatment.
Early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, such as dizziness, seizures and fatigue, can be confused with symptoms of other diseases, and its diagnosis is sometimes delayed and requires careful analysis of MRI scans of the brain.
“A diagnostic result like this makes early intervention more likely, giving patients a better life,” says one of the authors, UCSF neurology researcher Michael Wilson.
Infections and autoimmune diseases
Scientists believe that autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis are partly the result of rare immune responses to common infections.
In 2014, Wilson and another group of researchers began working to develop tools to identify the causes of autoimmune diseases, finding a method called PhIP-Seq that detects autoantibodies against more than 10,000 human proteins, enough to study almost any autoimmune disease.
In 2019, they tested this technique and discovered a rare autoimmune disease that appears to be due to testicular cancer.
The scientists believed the system could also identify the autoantibodies responsible for immune attacks in multiple sclerosis, opening new avenues for understanding and treating the disease.
Confirmation
To do this, they analyzed blood samples from 250 patients with the disease taken after diagnosis and compared them with blood samples taken five or more years earlier, when the patients signed up for the experiment.
They did the same with another 250 healthy patients who did not develop the disease.
As a result, 10% of patients with multiple sclerosis had a surprising number of autoantibodies in the years before diagnosis.
Patients with these autoantibodies had elevated levels of light neurofilaments, a protein that is released when neurons are destroyed, leading scientists to think that the immune system is confusing “good” human proteins with some viral enemy, which can lead to lifelong multiple sclerosis. .
To confirm their findings, the team analyzed blood samples from patients from another UCSF study, confirming that 10% of patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis had the same set of autoantibodies several years ago.
“Imagine if we could diagnose this disease earlier, the chances of moving from suppression to cure would increase,” says another author, Steven Houser from the same university.