Stress and Multiple Sclerosis Development Are Not Linked

A researcher at the University of Bergen demonstrated that the development of multiple sclerosis (MS) is not linked to the amount of stress people are subject to, as had been previously proposed by others.

The investigator, who conducted his work while a visiting scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health, in the United States, says that no clear correlation could be established between the two.

MS is a very dangerous disease, that is almost always fatal. It is cataloged as an autoimmune disorder, which means that the body's own immune system is perceiving some tissues as foreign, attacking them.

Patients experience the most severe effects in the brain and spinal cord. The disease results in the loss of vision, balance, sensation and motor control, but oftentimes has unpredictable course patterns.

“While we’ve known that stressful life events have been shown to increase the risk of MS episodes, we weren’t certain whether these stressors could actually lead to developing the disease itself,” explains researcher Trond Riise, PhD, the leader of the study.

The work, details of which appear in the latest print issue of the American Academy of Neurology's medical journal Neurology, was conducted on two groups of women nurses, whose data were collected from the Nurses’ Health Study.

The first group included women aged 30 to 55. The 121,700 individuals were tracked starting in 1976, while the 116,671 nurses in the second group were tracked starting in 1989. Members of the second group were aged between 25 and 42, PsychCentral reports.

By 2005, some 77 nurses in the first group had developed MS. From the second group, 292 women showed symptoms of the condition by 2004. Over the years, all participants were asked to report accurate accounts of the levels of stress they were subjected to.

“The risk of MS is particularly high among young women, and the difference in the number of cases is consistent with the different ages of women in the two groups at the beginning of the MS follow-up,” Riise says of the conclusions.

As such, the new investigation “rules out stress as a major risk factor for MS. Future research can now focus on repeated and more fine-tuned measures of stress,” the team leader adds.

Finding a cure for the autoimmune disease has been an objective in medicine for years, but thus far progress in understanding the root caused of the disorder has been very slow.