Pregnancy Repairs Some of the Damage of MS

According to an article in the Globe and Mail, the homone prolactin created by the body during pregnancy may be the key to further treatment of Multiple Sclerosis.

An autoimmune disorder, MS, causes the immune system to start attacking myelin, a coating on the nervous system. Some evidence suggests that during pregnancy, the disease goes into remission and the pregnant body actually repairs some of the damage of MS.

• “If you put it altogether, it suggests that increases in prolactin makes more myelin, which may contribute to some of the repair that is seen during pregnancy in MS,” explained Dr. Samuel Weiss, senior author of the study and director of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute.
• Dr. V. Wee Yong, who also worked on the study, said; “It’s remarkable. I mean pregnancy is a stressful state, and what is increasingly appreciated is during pregnancy there is the regeneration of a lot of cells.”

• “If we understood the biological processes that contribute to the improvement of well-being during pregnancy, one could now have a lead to take that into a therapeutic situation.”

The study results appear in the Journal of Neuroscience.