# Article on relation between MS and juvenile diabetes



## Guest (Mar 22, 2001)

This has nothing to do with IBS...so I'm posting it here...pretty interesting stuff.----By HELEN BRANSWELL - The Canadian PressTORONTO -- Multiple sclerosis and juvenile diabetes are far more closely linked than has been previously thought, and may in fact be different manifestations of the same disease, a team of researchers in Toronto and Pittsburgh reported Tuesday. Their research also suggests that a diet that includes cow's milk, which is suspected of increasing the risk of juvenile diabetes in those genetically susceptible, may also increase the risk of developing MS for those genetically predisposed to that disease. "Really, it looks as if the disease is really one process," lead investigator Dr. Michael Dosch said in an interview. "And if you have the wrong set of genes, you get MS or the other set of genes, you get diabetes. But the underlying disease looks almost the same." The article, published in the April issue of the Journal of Immunology, is written by a team of researchers from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, St. Michael's Hospital and Sunnybrook and Women's Health Sciences Centre (both in Toronto) and Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. The findings are likely to spark controversy. Several prestigious peer-reviewed journals -- Dosch mentioned three, Cell, Science and Nature -- refused to publish the article. "It took two years to publish this study," Dosch said, admitting with a laugh that some colleagues think he's crazy. "I have been reliably informed from experienced senior neurologists that I am certifiably off my rocker. That it is inconceivable -- I'm citing verbatim -- inconceivable that any of these data could be real." Both juvenile diabetes and MS are what are known as autoimmune diseases -- diseases in which the body's own disease protection system turns on itself, killing healthy cells and provoking a disease. The cells that do the killing are rogue T-cells, which normally would help the body stave off infection and diseases like cancer. Some people -- including Dosch -- have theorized that autoimmune diseases might be actually one disease, with various manifestations, just as cancer takes various forms in different individuals. "It's not the majority opinion," said Dosch, who is also a professor of immunology and pediatrics at the University of Toronto. "And we hope to change that. This adds considerable evidence." The evidence he's referring to is their unexpected discovery that the blood of MS patients also contains the T-cells that attack the pancreas and cause diabetes in people with juvenile diabetes. And the blood of juvenile diabetics contains the T-cells that attack the brain cells and cause MS in MS sufferers. Healthy people with neither disease would have neither of these T-cells. "So in the test tube, we couldn't say whether this blood sample comes from an MS patient or from a diabetic. It's weird. It was really unexpected," Dosch said. "We looked at MS and expected to find ... brain-specific T-cells, period. And were we in for a surprise! "We found that in MS, there were these brain-specific bad guys, but in addition, there were islet-specific T-cells (which cause diabetes). And that made no sense. I mean, why should an MS patient have T-cells that target insulin, for example? It's ridiculous." If diabetes and MS are closely linked or even one disease, why wouldn't everyone who develops one develop the other? "Well, this is part of the mystery of this work," admitted Dr. Paul O'Connor, a co-author and head of the MS clinic at St. Michael's. Another part of the mystery is the role cow's milk might play in triggering diabetes and MS in people with a genetic predisposition to them. Dosch is one of those who has been arguing for over a decade that drinking cow's milk increases the risk of developing juvenile diabetes in people with a genetic susceptibility to the disease. Other dairy products are not believed to pose a risk. "We know it (liquid cow's milk) adds to the risk. That data is now pretty clear. We don't know how." O'Connor, however, admitted the entire scientific community is not as sold on the idea as Dosch is and would be even more skeptical about a proposed link between drinking cow's milk and developing MS. "Once we were aware of this MS angle, for us, in my lab, it was the obvious thing," Dosch continued. "As a matter of fact, as soon as we got the first patient sample in, we looked for abnormal immunity to cow milk, which is typical for diabetes. And as we found, it's also typical for MS." In fact, when they gave the cow's milk peptoid that is believed to be the culprit in juvenile diabetes to mice bred to develop diabetes, they actually developed an MS-like disease. "So basically that experiment says that this is not a test-tube game. This is real, in vivo, relevant. But what the relevance is and how it works in MS, we don't know," Dosch said. If MS and juvenile diabetes are two forms of the same disease, scientists may be able to fast track MS research, which to date has lagged behind what has been learned about juvenile diabetes. For instance, it could lead to the development of tools for early detection of MS, which may turn out to be crucial if therapies or vaccines are developed. "If the diseases are so similar, or maybe even really one, then we now have learned that most likely there is a pre-MS phase as well that would go on for years," Dosch explained. "And then by analogy ... the promise to achieve disease intervention at that stage is much, much bigger than going to full-blown disease." [This message has been edited by RopesEnd (edited 03-22-2001).]


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## sickofsick (Nov 4, 1999)

I read this too. Very interesting.sickofsick


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