The Lancet Neurology in conversation with
Jul 15, 2026 · 16 min · 8 segments
In this episode, Heather Brown, Senior Editor at The Lancet Neurology, chats with Jan Lünemann (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Christian Münz (University of Zürich, Switzerland) about…
Jan LunemannGuest
Christian MünzGuest
Heather BrownHost
For any of our listeners who might not know, what is Epstein-Barr virus or EBV, and how has it been implicated in MS?
Epstein-Barr virus or EBV is, um, one of the most successful human viruses, meaning it infects exclusively humans, and it is extraordinary common.
It infects more than 90% of adults world- worldwide, and usually primary infection takes place during childhood and adolescence, but the virus is never completely eliminated.
It establishes lifelong latency in a subset of, uh, blood cells, memory B cells, a type of immune cells that plays a central role in the immune regulation, and it's also very important in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis.
There have been, over decades, epidemiological studies published that linked EBV infection to MS, but the evidence remained largely circumstantial for a long time, and that changed dramatically four years ago in 2022 when Alberto Ascherio and his team followed more than 10 million young adults over two decades and showed that the risk of developing MS increased more than thirtyfold after EBV infection.
And this established EBV as by far the strongest known environmental risk factor for MS.
The challenge now is to understand precisely how it drives disease susceptibility, why only a small fraction of infected people develop MS, and how these insights can be translated into therapies or perhaps even preventive strategies.
For any of our listeners who might not know, what is Epstein-Barr virus or EBV, and how has it been implicated in MS?
Epstein-Barr virus or EBV is, um, one of the most successful human viruses, meaning it infects exclusively humans, and it is extraordinary common.
It infects more than 90% of adults world- worldwide, and usually primary infection takes place during childhood and adolescence, but the virus is never completely eliminated.
It establishes lifelong latency in a subset of, uh, blood cells, memory B cells, a type of immune cells that plays a central role in the immune regulation, and it's also very important in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis.
There have been, over decades, epidemiological studies published that linked EBV infection to MS, but the evidence remained largely circumstantial for a long time, and that changed dramatically four years ago in 2022 when Alberto Ascherio and his team followed more than 10 million young adults over two decades and showed that the risk of developing MS increased more than thirtyfold after EBV infection.
And this established EBV as by far the strongest known environmental risk factor for MS.
The challenge now is to understand precisely how it drives disease susceptibility, why only a small fraction of infected people develop MS, and how these insights can be translated into therapies or perhaps even preventive strategies.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.