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Competitive_Tree_113 t1_j9bvxdh wrote

Reply to comment by Final_Maintenance319 in Is COVID unique in the way it affects different individuals in such different ways? by stupidrobots

And depression is well documented after Epstein-Barr infection.

As well as other things like hair loss and chronic fatigue syndrome.

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princessParking t1_j9c5xlx wrote

Isn't it present in like 80% of people though? Wouldn't everything be correlated to such a large percentage of the population?

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dankcoffeebeans t1_j9c6vqh wrote

It has a 95% seroprevalence so it is extremely common. Those conditions are rare outcomes of infection with EBV.

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Tight-laced t1_j9cjtnn wrote

This study of US Army Personnel was the groundbreaking link. It took 10m samples over 20 years, so a huge sample size. 955 army Personnel developed MS over the course of the study, of those 955, 954 had had EBV infections prior to developing MS.

So if you develop MS, there's a 99.9% chance you've had EBV, versus a 95% chance in the general population. They tested for other viruses, none stood out like EBV.

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chemical_sunset t1_j9d37ev wrote

The thought is that most people do not have the genetic predisposition to develop MS, but amongst those of us who do, EBV infection seems like an important switch to activate the MS disease process.

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_dinoLaser_ t1_j9cn9cf wrote

It’s interesting that it correlates almost 1:1, but having EBV is so common that it almost means nothing. Unless the ten percent of people that never had it also never get Parkinson’s 100% of the time. Wild if that’s the case.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559285/#article-21268_s1

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David_Warden t1_j9fjb0z wrote

As numbers get close to 100% we have a tendency to think of them as much the same and sometimes miss something important.

Let's look at the numbers based on who hasn't tested positive for EBV.

5% in the general population 0.1% in the population with MS

This is a ratio of 50:1 which doesn't seem likely to be meaningless to me.

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NW_thoughtful t1_j9d63en wrote

The key is reactivation of the virus vs carrying the virus.

Think of the analogy of people who get cold sores. The virus lays dormant in the system and sometimes gets stirred up producing a cold sore. So the percentage of people who carry herpes virus in this example is much higher than the percentage of people who have it active at any given time.

With ebv, 95% of people have it and somewhere around 3 to 5% of people have it reactivate. When it reactivates, it can activate autoimmune processes such as MS as well as being directly inflammatory.

In the study on MS noted, most who had MS had EBV. The likelihood is that most of those actually had reactivated EBV.

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