Cause is still not well explained. EBV is such an ubiquitous virus, more than 90% of all adults worldwide have been infected with it. Most will never know. Why is that just a tiny percentage develop MS?
Also if you are of Northern European descent the risk is higher if I remember correctly.
Possibly it's a mix of many things and you have to be one of the unlucky people where that mix triggers something in the immune system and the disease develops.
I am very unlucky in that regard.
According to my doctors the number of autoimmune diseases I have is rare in a single person.
I have a sysmetic autoimmune disease (Rheumatoid Artritis) and autoimmune diseases in my kidneys, liver,thyroid, skin and mouth.
So somehow multipe times there were events in my life where a mix of things caused my immune system to turn against me.
A little off-topic, but to give an impression of how that works out in daily life, in case you are also diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
If you are lucky, there is good medication and you will hardly notice you're ill, except for the checkups with your doctor
I also know some autoimmune diseases can (become) pretty aggressive, but n=1, most people I know with autoimmune diseases have a decent quality of life.
Fortunately, in my case also for each disease there is medication that either supresses the inflammation or the protects my body against the effects of the auto-immune response.
So I take my pills and a bi-weekly injection with a biological and I can continue to live with a decent quality of life.
Except for one important thing, my main remaining symptom is that I have a lot less energy than most people and need much more sleep.
Despite that all inflammation parameters in my blood show no signs of inflammation or activity of the disease, my body somehow loses energy to something.
This seems to be a complaint of many autoimmune illness sufferers, no signs of activity of the ilness, but more tired than before the disease came into their life.
Hopefully there will soon be more developments in this area of medicine.
I believe this has been largely disregarded. The higher incidence rate in Europe/Anglosphere was a consequence of higher testing and accurate diagnoses, coupled with the ability to provide treatment.
https://denovo.substack.com/p/epstein-barr-virus-more-maladi...
Most people don't develop food allergies. Especially most adults if they don't have a family history of it/didn't have any food allergies as children. Those that do typically only develop 1 or 2.
I can't imagine how infinitesimally small the odds of this happening to me are, and yet here I am, at age 31, with nearly 30 food allergies that all activated about a year ago, seemingly overnight. No known cause, and after a year of researching the immune system and just how depressingly little medical science knows about it, I doubt I'll ever know, let alone receive a treatment that will allow me to eat like a normal person again.
And that's just one way in which the immune system can go haywire. There's MS and all the dozens of other (auto)immune issues -- so many that some don't even have a name. It is truly baffling, but the immune system has gotta be one of the single most complex systems known to man. There's a whole lot of ways something like that can break.
Something like CRISPR/Cas9 editing may be the way to treat persistent EBV and other herpesvirus infections.
With little protein expression, training T-cells to identify viral MHC-epitopes is unlikely to ever clear something like EBV. There's no proteins, there's no virions, there's no proteases, the better target is the genome itself: