(News item) Canadian study of children's MS risk

 
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agate
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 11:36 pm    Post subject: (News item) Canadian study of children's MS risk Reply with quote

From Macleans, August 9, 2006:

Quote:

August 09, 2006

Environment influences childhood MS risk

Many Canadian kids with multiple sclerosis have parents who were born in countries where the disease is rare.

There may be something about living in Canada that raises children's risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS), an incurable nerve disease whose exact cause is not known.

MS is believed to result from the body's own immune system attacking nerve cells' protective coating, or myelin sheath. The resulting damage can affect vision, hearing, memory, balance and mobility.

The disease is more common in Canada, northern Europe, southern Australia and New Zealand than in other parts of the world. And a recent study by researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children and St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto suggests that even if families come to Canada from countries were MS is less common, their children develop the same risk as families that have been here for generations.

"What we're really showing is the powerful influence of the environment in this particular group, because these children largely come from families where the parents have been born in regions of the world where MS would be less frequent or even rare," says Dr. Brenda Banwell, director of the pediatric MS clinic at Sick Kids. "Yet living in Ontario they seem to have developed, as far as we can tell, the same risk for MS as individuals whose parents come from northern Europe, or who have been in Canada for many generations. So it does support that there's a fairly powerful environmental trigger here."





That environmental trigger is unknown, but it could be related to viral infections, or a shortage of vitamin D due to lack of sunlight exposure.

Banwell and her colleagues studied data on ancestry, place of birth and place of childhood residence for 44 children and 573 adults with MS. All of the children and 79 per cent of the adults spent at least part of their childhood in Ontario, an area with one of the world's highest incidences of MS.

Children with MS were more likely than adult patients to be of Caribbean or Asian descent, and less likely to have European ancestry. There was also a trend indicating Middle-Eastern heritage may be more common among children with MS, compared with adults. These results mirror the changing demographics in Ontario, which has become more multicultural since the early 1970s.

Banwell says the study results imply doctors need to be more aware of the possibility of the disease in children from ethnic groups that are normally considered less likely to develop MS.

With files from The Medical Post.



This story can be found at:
[url]http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/health/article.jsp?content=20060808_143023_4608 [/url]
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lady_express_44



Joined: 22 May 2006
Posts: 1314
Location: Vancouver, Canada

PostPosted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 12:05 am    Post subject: Re: (News item) Canadian study of children's MS risk Reply with quote

agate wrote:

That environmental trigger is unknown, but it could be related to viral infections, or a shortage of vitamin D due to lack of sunlight exposure.


I believe there is an environmental trigger, but I've never bought into the "vitamin D/sunlight" theory.

We get far less sunshine in Vancouver (gray skies) then most any other populated area in Canada. But the central provinces have a lot higher incidence of MS then here. scratch

The genetic component doesn't answer that either (as this article indicates).

Cherie
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