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A new study on multiple sclerosis suggests that the biological mechanisms behind it could be triggered years before clinical diagnosis. Several typical symptoms could attest to this. A breakthrough that teaches us a little more about the disease.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurological disease which affects 120,000 people in France and in which the immune system attacks myelin, the protective sheath of nerve fibers giving rise to various disabilities. Although treatment has improved considerably over the last ten years, there is currently no curative treatment to stop or reverse the process. But little by little, new data is allowing us to better understand MS and better understand it. This is the subject of a recent study which believes it has discovered various warning symptoms common to people with MS.
Depression, constipation, cystitis… Symptoms that frequently recur
Several studies had already suggested that, in some patients, certain subtle symptoms were present up to ten years before diagnosis. It remained to quantify this phenomenon on a population scale. For this purpose, Professor Céline Louapre, researcher at the Brain Institute and her teams compared the health data of 20,174 patients with multiple sclerosis, 54,790 patients without multiple sclerosis, and 37,814 patients affected by two autoimmune diseases, Crohn’s disease or lupus.
The team analyzed the health trajectory of these patients, and more specifically the frequency of 113 common symptoms and illnesses over a period of five years before to five years after diagnosis. The researchers observed that five symptoms were significantly associated with a subsequent diagnosis of multiple sclerosis:
- The Depression ;
- Sexual disorders;
- The constipation ;
- Cystitis;
- Other urinary tract infections.
The overrepresentation of these symptoms persisted and increased during the five years after diagnosis.
Signs to know to speed up treatment
For researchers, this is a big step forward.
“This association was sufficiently robust at the statistical level for us to be able to affirm that these are clinical warning signs, probably linked to lesions of the nervous system, in patients who will later receive a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.”, specifies Professor Céline Louapre.
However, these five symptoms also appeared in patients who also subsequently contracted lupus or Crohn’s disease. They are also common in healthy people.
“These signs alone will not be enough to make an early diagnosis; but they will certainly help us to better understand the mechanisms of multiple sclerosis, of which there are multiple causes, and to reconstruct its natural history.. Finally, these new data reinforce our idea that the disease begins well before the appearance of classic neurological symptoms. adds the scientist.
Otherwise, it is not because you suffer from depression or urinary infections that you will develop MS in a few years. But the information can help to alert populations who already have a specific family risk in advance, and to monitor them a little earlier.