New discovery may aid treatment of multiple sclerosis

Manama : A team of medical researchers in Bahrain announced that they have made an interesting discovery, which could help toward improving the treatment of multiple sclerosis.

Researchers from the Princess Al Jawhara Centre for Molecular Medicine & Inherited Disorders believe their recent discovery will aid in improving the treatment of the auto-immune disease. Their study revealed five genes that were significantly higher in multiple sclerosis patients when compared to control group.

“Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a multi-factorial disease of the Central Nervous System (CNS) affecting young adults leading to significant disabilities over time. MS is now believed to be prevalent in Arabian Gulf area with high incidence due to environmental factors and unknown genetic variations. The objectives of this study was to detect up-regulated potential genes that might be involved in neuroinflammatory process in MS patients in Bahrain and to measure the protein levels of the expressed genes,” the report stated.

A newly introduced technique called microarray was used to examine gene expression. Blood samples from 88 Bahraini MS patients and from 88 from a control group from Salmaniya Medical Complex was used for the study.

Of the 47000 genes examined, the report noted the expression of 15,480 genes and five genes TNF-AIP6, IL-1RA, OASL, CLC and DOCK4 were found to be higher in MS patients.  

The study also suggested biomarkers to understand the MS inflammatory process and to analyze treatment response.