September 23, 2008

Stressful life events have been associated with MS relapses in past research studies, but the findings haven't been unanimous. A new study adds to the evidence that there is a connection between stress and relapses, at least in women.

In this study, researchers followed 26 women with relapsing-remitting MS for a little over a year on average. The women recorded stressful life events (SLEs) in diaries, classifying them as having a long term impact (at least 10-14 days) or not. They also determined how severe each SLE was. When this information was combined with relapse records, the researchers found that having three or more SLEs in four weeks resulted in a 5-fold increase in relapse rate, and having one long-term SLE increased the risk of relapse during the following month by three times. Relapse risk was not affected by severity or type of stressful event.

So if you have MS and are able to reduce the number of stressful events in your life, you may experience fewer relapses (while also reducing the other harmful effects of stress).

I've corrected the headline from this report to reflect the mouse-vs-human results, but either way they are promising.

While the title claims it is reducing symptoms, if you look at Figure 2 from the paper it appears to have mostly halted the progression after administration rather than caused a big improvement (although there was some).

Let's inject some of these cells into humans and see if they do the same thing.