Pregnancy may hold key to curing MS
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.
Andrews, 33, has multiple sclerosis — 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 80 per cent 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, nobody has yet discovered how or why.
Now, for the first time, an MS Society-funded study at Oxford University 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 Prof Lars Fugger, who is leading the project at the Oxford Centre for Neuroinflammation.
“Many of the current drugs offered to patients are designed to suppress the immune system, but they often have serious side effects and patients can catch infections.
“During pregnancy, women with MS find that their disease is reduced, even after stopping their medications, which suggests that their bodies are capable of suppressing disease directly — and without side effects,” he says.
“We want to identify what . . . drives this reduced disease. We [then] hope to be able to either design new drugs or to repurpose drugs . . . used for other diseases, which may offer protection with fewer side effects.”
The Oxford team also wants to gain more general knowledge about pregnancy and MS, as women are often diagnosed at the time in life when they want to start a family.
Actor Selma Blair, 46, is one of the more high-profile patients with MS. Blair, who went to the Oscars using a walking stick, was making her first public appearance since her diagnosis last October.
Fugger’s research will isolate the cells of the immune system and examine them to identify the gene expression — the mechanisms — by which the immune system modulates disease during pregnancy.
Andrews was diagnosed with MS in Dec 2014 — four months before her wedding to husband Robert. Symptoms included blurred vision, a numb face, and pins and needles in her legs. She worried whether it was safe to have children.
“I was scared,” she recalls. “There isn’t a lot of information out there. But other women, my neurologist and MS nurse reassured me. The main complication was that I had to come off my medication three months before conceiving. Fortunately, I got pregnant straight way.”
The improvement to her MS symptoms was impossible to ignore: “I felt so much better. Yes, I was tired in pregnancy, like everyone, but I no longer had the MS fatigue, which is like having concrete blocks strapped to your feet while you try to walk. You can’t think, or move, or talk.”
One theory is that pregnancy’s protective effect might have something to do with the way the balance of female hormones changes the way immune system cells behave.
The little research done in this area has not found a protective effect from either the contraceptive pill or HRT, or a significant menopausal impact.
The MS Society believes that with research, MS can be stopped.
Andrews has not had a relapse since son Alexander, now 4 months old, was born — although she says her fatigue has flared up a little. She is now back on medication, which means she can’t breastfeed. But an MRI scan a month after she gave birth revealed no active lesions on her brain or spinal cord, proving conclusively that pregnancy had put her MS into remission.