Recent Findings in Neurology: Multiple Sclerosis and Stroke

Hans-Christoph Diener, MD, PhD

April 06, 2022

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Dear colleagues, I am Christoph Diener, from the medical faculty of the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and I want to report what happened in the first 6 weeks of 2022 in neurology, focused on multiple sclerosis and stroke.

Let me start with the spectacular publication in Science on the possible relationship between Epstein-Barr virus infections and multiple sclerosis. This paper is based on 10 million people in the American Army who were followed from 1993 to 2013. In this population, 925 people developed multiple sclerosis; serum samples were available from 801 people and 800 had positive titers against Epstein-Barr virus. This was much higher than in the control population. For cytomegalovirus infections, there was no difference.

When they looked at the conversion rate for Epstein-Barr virus in serum, this was the case in 97% of the patients with multiple sclerosis, but only in 57% in the control group. These data would suggest that there is an association between Epstein-Barr virus infection and multiple sclerosis, but this does not mean this is a causal relationship. There was a large amount of public press coverage of this study. The conclusion was that possibly a vaccination against Epstein-Barr virus would prevent multiple sclerosis, but unfortunately, this vaccination is not yet available.

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