It has been a decade now since Barry Marshall and Robin Warren from the University of Western Australia (UWA) were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering the link between Helicobacter Pylori (H.pylori) and the development of peptic ulcers. Famously, their discovery involved Marshall ingesting the bacteria himself in order to prove his hypothesis. In keeping with very many Nobel Prize winners, the duo had to contend with fierce opposition from colleagues within the medical fraternity who simply refused to believe that there was any suggestion that ulcers could be due to infectious organisms.

A decade on, the multiple sclerosis (MS) research group from UWA have collaborated with Barry Marshall to investigate the possible connections between H.pylori and MS development. In a paper that appears in this month’s issue of JNNP, the authors have explored the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ in MS http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/86/6/603.abstract . This hypothesis contends that exposure to infections early in life are able to potentially reduce development of allergic and immune disease later in life through priming of the immune system. In their paper, the authors provide evidence that evidence of exposure to H.pylori is lower in MS patients than in controls. They also demonstrate that female MS patients who have evidence of previous exposure to H.pylori have lower rates of disability than those who do not. In terms of future research, the authors suggest that it would be important to work out why this relationship is only noted female patients and not in male patients.

One of the most common concerns that I hear as a clinician from MS patients concerns their ability to organise and look after their lives. MS patients who have even the most mild degrees of physical disability report an alarmingly significant effect of the illness of their ability to multi-task and to just get things done in the course of a day. Due to the rapid rate of progress in developing new drugs for MS, we don’t see the levels of physical disability that we used to compared to patients who developed the condition in decades past. Yet, regardless of which medication an MS patient is taking, almost all report fatigue and some difficulty with decision making. The difficulty as a clinician is diagnosing this as there are no simple bedside tests to assess you go about making the sorts of daily decisions that one needs to as a functioning adult. Treatments? Don’t go there, there is simply nothing out there for this problem.

For any disease, you can’t really develop treatments that work without a very detailed knowledge of the mechanism that cause that disease. That’s my lead-in for telling MS patients that there is little I can offer them for any type of cognitive change that they may experience. Fortunately, Muhlert and colleagues http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/86/5/530.abstract have provided an interesting paper in the current issue of JNNP which provides the first evidence that changes in decision-making in MS patients are related to changes in specific parts of the brain’s grey and white matter. These are the studies that we need to make headway into a very prevalent issue for MS patients and their families.