Re: Genes and environment in multiple sclerosis

[Guest guest]

Thanks so much for this article Dave.I will pass it on to my sister who has MS.LeeDear All;We've probably all heard the saying that autoimmune disease is determined by both environment and genes. I guess the best example of this is celiac disease, which is triggered by dietary substances (wheat proteins) in patients carrying a certain variant of a gene (HLA-DQB1) in the major histocompatibility complex. Many other autoimmune diseases have been shown to have a genetic component in the major histocompatibility complex region, but few of the environmental factors have been identified, and where they have been identified, their exact interaction with the susceptibility gene has not been worked out. An example of this is multiple sclerosis, where a major susceptibility gene seems to be a certain variant of the HLA-DRB1 gene, and an enviromental susceptibility factor seems to be vitamin D deficiency, but exactly how the two interact with one another has not been identified.