Daffodil Lane: Prolactin reverses MS damage

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February 22, 2007

Prolactin reverses MS damage

Well it appears that the women of the world may have within their hormones a secret weapon that not only defeats MS, but may be used to heal other kinds of spinal cord injuries as well. Multiple Sclerosis breaks down the covering over the nerve cells in the spine called myelin, which causes the cells to start to fail to do their job of transmitting electrical impulses from the brain. It was already known that oestrogen protected women from losing this myelin, but it had been observed in the human female population that when a woman with MS got pregnant that they went into remission and seemed to be better off after the pregnancy. So researchers decided to reproduce the state in mice to see if they could find the source of the protection.

Prolactin as you can probably figure out by the breakdown of the word does exactly what it says it does, it encourages lactation in females. It turns out that this hormone goes in and starts repairing myelin in the spine as well for reasons that no one is quite clear on. On one level while this is an amazing discovery, there is some concern about causing lactation in men and women to treat MS. A valid concern, but given the debilitating side effects of MS, it could definitely be something you learned to work around. Even if you only limited the treatment to women for social reasons, I think it's a small price to pay in the long run. In the end MS strikes women in larger numbers than men anyway, so a treatment focused on them would be a good choice.

They are going to do more research on the interactions of course. Interestingly they suggest that Prolactin could be dangerous if it causes inflammation. Seems to contradict this study from my point of view. If pregnant women were adversely effected by it, it would seem that they would not have shown positive results. It could be the cocktail of pregnancy hormones that mitigate the side effects or that the doses of Prolactin they have used in previous studies were in excess of what a woman's body would expect naturally. A lot of interesting questions to ask and get answered.