The new cause of MS

Has someone found the unifying theory about the cause of MS? #MSBlog #MSResearch

"When I started out in the field of MS I wrote several hypothesis-like papers to get my thoughts around MS. Several of them died an untimely death simply because I was naive and hadn't read the literature. Some of them remain to be disproved or proved. On this journey I discovered the science of causations and realised that greater minds than mine had considered causation in much more depth than I and I was simply copying their theses. This latest hypothesis sounds like it needs a good dose of causation theory applied to it and an experimental framework proposed to disprove it."

Insofar as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and insofar as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.  Karl Raimund Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2002), 316. 




Krone B, Grange JM.Is a hypothetical melanoma-like neuromelanin the underlying factor essential for the aetiopathogenesis and clinical manifestations of multiple scle rosis? BMC Neurol. 2013 Jul 18;13(1):91.

Background: MS has undergone a significant increase in incidence in the industrialised nations over the last 130 years. Changing environmental factors, possibly infections or a lack of or altered timing of them, determine the prevalence of the disease. Although a plethora of aetiological factors, clearly evident in a group of children with MS, appear relevant, there may nevertheless be a single factor essential for the aetiopathogenesis and clinical manifestation of MS. 


Description and discussion: This hitherto unknown factor is postulated to be a 'melanoma-like neuromelanin' (MLN) dependent on the activation of a gene for syncytin-1. An involvement of MLN could explain the diverse findings in the epidemiology, immunology and pathology of MS, requiring a consideration of a complex infectious background, the human leucocyte antigens, as well as cosmic radiation causing geomagnetic disturbances, vitamin D deficiency, smoking, and lower levels of uric acid.

Summary: In principle, the MLN-based concept is a unifying one, capable of explaining a number of characteristics of the disease. To date, MLN has not been addressed in studies on MS and future work will need to be done on human MSers, as there is little or no neuromelanin (the precursor of MLN) in the animals used as experimental models in the study of MS.

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