PhD project The project investigates if exposure to certain environmental factors can be associated with the risk of developing multiple sclerosis in the future.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic autoimmune disease affecting the central nervous system. It is now acknowledged that a combination of multiple environmental factors elicits an autoimmune reaction in genetically susceptible individuals. Most previous studies of these environmental factors were retrospective, conferring the risk of reverse causation or recall bias. Few studies have been performed on samples collected before the clinical debut of MS and even fewer on samples collected during childhood or adolescence, which appear to be a window of susceptibility, determining the future risk.
A nested case-control study is performed by cross-linking Swedish MS registries with Swedish biobanks, thereby identifying serum or plasma samples donated from individuals who later developed MS. These individuals are included as cases. For each case, up to two controls are selected, matched for biobank, sex, sampling date and age. In these samples, the following environmental risk factors are assessed; Herpesviruses: Epstein-Barr virus, Human Herpesvirus 6-A and Cytomegalovirus; The free form of Vitamin D3 and its carrier protein Vitamin D Binding Protein; and CRP, a marker of systemic inflammation. The associations between these risk factors and future MS risk is analyzed with conditional logistic regression.
The project is carried out in collaboration with research groups at Karolinska Institutet (Professor Ingrid Kockum, Professor Tomas Olsson), Sahlgrenska University Hospital (Professor Oluf Andersen, Professor Tomas Bergström, Professor Henrik Zetterberg) and the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg (Dr Tim Waterboer).
