MS society funds study of immune system to understand why pregnancy can alleviate autoimmune conditions, possible ME relevances

https://www.mssociety.org.uk/research/latest-research/latest-research-news-and-blogs/could-we-harness-the-power-of-pregnancy-to-stop-ms?

 

Very interesting research

Even though it would be hard for me to get pregnant

 

A bit off topic, but would be interesting, although painful to see how many female pwME have had miscarriages. This can also be an immune system problem.

 

I would personally like to see more research around this area generally, a proper study to see how many with ME who had pregnancy felt benefits
was it long lasting etc, miscarriages information could be useful, plus research on how many women don’t have children because of the illness, which could be used to highlight impact, as having a child is seen as an important “right” for women , how the illness has affected family life , raising kids etc and many other subjects

 

Good to see some niomedical research being funded by the MS society.

Better than can CBT help fatigue in people with MS.

 

Yes, it’s sad they primarily seem to have given MS fatigue over to Rona moss who has a toolkit of cbt, exercise and mindfulness for every disorder. They give do do loads of biomedical research btw, To people who aren’t followers , it’s just on the fatigue aspect they include bps approach highly.

 

it would not surprise me if they found out that parts of the immune system are dampened throughout a pregnancy seems like common sense when carrying a foetus that is part of two different people . I am sure that could actually be said better lol .

 

Yea it is what happens apparently https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025626/

 

This is actually a misconception that has been widespread in immunology for as long as I can remember - as I think I have mentioned before.

In a graft situation the foreign tissue is supplied by the host blood vessels and policed by the host immune system. But a foetus has its own blood vessels which it polices with its own immune system. The mother's immune system cannot police the foetus's tissues because any immune cells from the mother that get into these tissues end up in the foetus's lymph nodes where they will be destroyed.

Antibody immunity is a problem when it comes to damaging foetal red cells in Rhesus disease but the idea that the mother's immune system has to switch off a TH1 cellular immune response makes no sense as far as I can see.

 

This could be very interesting, given that Jessica Taylor-Bearman's ME became less severe during her pregnancy (it's too early to say yet whether those improvements have remained after her daughter was born). The same happens for some PWME... but then some other PWME (Sophie cooklynn is one who springs to mind) became more unwell during pregnancy.

I think I remember seeing a bar chart about this somewhere from a survey of Pwme. I think the highest bar was worse during pregnancy, the next highest bar was better during pregnancy, and the lowest bar was no difference. But I may be remembering wrong.

 

I will be watching out for this. I certainly improved in pregnancy and have always thought that it would be an interesting route to follow.

 

I was hoping u would chime in! That makes sense, I didn`t even know foetuses had working immune systems. So the t-cell shift is not proven u say, or if it is its happening for some other reason?

A question that came to mind.. Why dont the immune system of the mother disrupt the foetus development before its immune system starts to develop?

 

I have three children and never felt better when pregnant. (I wasn't diagnosed until during the third). I had preeclampsia with all three as well.