The ‘anti-diet’ revolution

Nicola Andrews was surprised that carrying her first child seemed to ‘cure’ her multiple sclerosis, writes Hilary Freeman

When Nicola Andrews became pregnant in 2017, she was surprised to discover that she felt better than she had in years. Although she suffered from severe morning sickness, her other health problems — the overwhelming fatigue, blurred vision and weird tingling sensations in her limbs, which had blighted her daily life before pregnancy — entirely vanished.

Nicola (33), a membership services officer for a children’s charity from Newtownabbey, Co Antrim, has multiple sclerosis (MS) — a neurological disease in which the immune system attacks the nervous system, causing symptoms including pain, spasms and problems with mobility, balance and vision.

What she experienced during pregnancy — an easing, or cessation, of her symptoms — is not unusual. In fact, it’s common; for many women, pregnancy puts MS into remission. Studies have shown that, in the third trimester, there is around an 80pc decrease in MS relapses.

While scientists have long known that pregnancy dampens down the immune system, so a woman’s body doesn’t reject the baby as a foreign object, and that this can alleviate the symptoms of several auto-immune conditions, such as MS and rheumatoid arthritis, nobody has yet discovered how or why.

Now, for the first time, an study at Oxford University, funded by Britain’s MS Society, will attempt to find some answers and harness the power of pregnancy in order to develop new and better treatments.

“In MS, immune cells attack the brain and spinal cord,” explains immunologist Professor Lars Fugger, who is leading the project at the Oxford Centre for