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Autoimmune diseases tend to ease up during pregnancy, and for women with multiple sclerosis, physicians have documented fewer relapses of the condition while women are pregnant compared to before and after having a baby. Anecdotally, many MS patients also feel better when they’re expecting. Researchers believe that this happens because during pregnancy, the body reins in its immune response so as to not reject the fetus—and in doing so counteracts autoimmune diseases. But as to how exactly this all works, scientists are uncertain.
“Obviously, everybody would love to understand why it happens because if you could bottle that property of pregnancy, perhaps you could use it therapeutically,” Adrian Erlebacher, a reproductive immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, tells The Scientist.
To investigate why this happens in pregnant women with multiple sclerosis (MS), Stefan Gold, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis ...
