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Despite years of intensive research, the etiology of multiple sclerosis (MS) has remained elusive. Infectious agents, in addition to other factors, have been investigated as a cause of this debilitating disease. Seroepidemiologic studies suggest a causal link to Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection.
Believing that MS might result from a “perturbed” EBV infection in the central nervous system, researchers in Italy and the U.K. looked for markers of EBV infection in postmortem brain tissue from 22 MS patients with diverse clinical courses, 9 patients with other conditions (7 with inflammatory neurologic diseases, 1 with Alzheimer disease, and 1 with non–EBV-related lymphoblastic leukemia), and 2 controls without neurologic disease. Using in situ…