14 DAY TRIAL // Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a terrible disease that affects millions of people worldwide, and produces devastating consequences for the human body. At this point, there is little researchers can do in terms of finding a cure for this condition, and most course of treatment are aimed at relieving some of the pain associated with it. But, as they were looking into the causes of this affliction, researchers noticed discrepancies in the number of cases recorded at various latitudes on the planet. Near the Equator, the disease made a lot less victims than it did at higher latitudes.
The correlation was first observed more than three decades ago, and researchers have in the mean time linked this phenomenon with increased exposure to sunlight in the people living closer to the Equator. Many scientists have proposed that increased levels of vitamin D – which is produced as the skin is exposed to sunlight – may be responsible for adverting the effects of multiple sclerosis, but these ideas were never accurately tested. Now, a new investigation proposes that the difference is actually caused by increased amount of ultraviolet (UV) radiation in the light falling on the Equator.
According to University of the Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) Steenbock Research Professor of Biochemistry Hector DeLuca, vitamin D may indeed play some part in stopping MS from grabbing a hold on people. However, he proposes that UV wavelengths in the sunlight exert a more important influence on the disease. Details of his investigations, which were conducted with first author Bryan Becklund, were published in the latest online issue of the esteemed publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Since the 1970s, a lot of people have believed that sunlight worked through vitamin D to reduce MS. It's true that large doses of the active form of vitamin D can block the disease in the animal model. That causes an unacceptably high level of calcium in the blood, but we know that people at the equator don't have this high blood calcium, even though they have a low incidence of MS. So it seems that something other than vitamin D could explain this geographic relationship,” DeLuca says. He adds, however, that the new finding may not be helpful in any way. It is still too early to say whether the results will have any applications in humans or not.
“There are several ways this could go. If we can find out what the UV is producing, maybe we could give that as a medicine. In the short term, if we can define a specific wavelength of light that is active, and it does not overlap with the wavelengths that cause cancer, we could expose patients who have been diagnosed with MS to that wavelength,” he concludes.