A hormone released during pregnancy could help reverse damage in the cortex of the brain caused by multiple sclerosis (MS), a recent study led by UCLA has found.
In people with MS, a potentially disabling autoimmune disease, immune cells attack and damage a protective coating called myelin, which surrounds nerves in the brain and spinal cord.
When myelin is damaged, the nerve cells can no longer communicate with each other, which triggers symptoms of the disease.
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“Atrophy in the cortex, the largest and most complex part of the brain, is associated with permanent disability worsening, including cognition impairment and paralysis,” lead author Allan MacKenzie-Graham, an associate professor of neurology at UCLA, told Fox News Digital in an emailed statement.
In the study — published last month in Laboratory Investigation, a peer-reviewed medical journal of pathology — researchers gave a pregnancy hormone called estriol to mice that had a preclinical model of MS.
The hormone was shown to slow damage, while also generating new myelin in the brains of the mice.
Currently, there are no FDA-approved treatments to repair MS-induced damage in the brain’s cortex — only treatments to decrease inflammation and slow the disease.
Many groups have been trying for over a decade to achieve brain repair, but the results have been discouraging, said MacKenzie-Graham.
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“We were surprised (and very happy) that we were able to do it,” he also said.
One possible reason for the successful outcome is that estriol is a natural estrogen produced during pregnancy, the researcher said.
In a way, the hormone could have simulated the process of myelin creation during brain development in the womb.
“Estriol targets the cells that produce myelin, encouraging them to produce more,” he said. “It also inhibits the cells that…
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