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FRIDAY, July 27 (HealthDay News) -- A new study of identical twins suggests that children who spend more time in the sun have a lower risk for developing multiple sclerosis (MS) as adults.
"Evidence is building up that something in relation to sunlight and/or vitamin D exposure during childhood may play a protective role," said study co-author Dr. Thomas M. Mack, of the department of preventive medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. "It's now been suggested by several different studies that this is the case, and if it's true, it would be important."
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The study is published in the July 24 issue of Neurology.
The findings echo those of a recent Harvard School of Public Health study, released in December and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That study found that among 140 white men and women, those with the highest levels of sunlight-derived vitamin D were 62 percent less likely to have developed MS than those with the lowest levels. The finding was not replicated in a smaller patient pool of either blacks or Hispanics, however.
According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS), MS is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system that currently affects more than 400,000 Americans. More than 2.5 million men and women worldwide suffer from the disorder.
While it is unclear what causes MS, the often-crippling disease is thought to develop when the body's own immune system begins attacking a fat and protein-laden substance called myelin that insulates nerve fibers.
Numbness, tingling, loss of coordination and balance, blindness, fatigue, and even paralysis can ensue, as normal communications between brain and body progressively collapse.
The majority of MS patients are first diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50, and female patients outnumber males two-to-one.
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