Associations between Toxoplasma gondii Infection and Multiple Sclerosis: A Case-Control Seroprevalence Study

Abstract

Background: Currently, there are conflicting reports on the associations between Toxoplasma gondii infection and multiple sclerosis (MS) in humans. In the present study, a case–control study was carried out to assess associations between seropositivity to T. gondii infection and MS.
 Methods: This case-control study was carried out on 200 MS patients (cases) attended in Sina Hospital affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran, and 200 healthy subjects from the general population of the same city, March to July 2017. Blood samples were collected from individuals and were examined using Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the presence of T. gondii IgG antibodies and the IgG-positive samples were further analyzed for specific anti-T. gondii IgM.
 Results: The overall seroprevalence of anti-T. gondii IgG was 44.2% (177/400) in 121 (60.5%) sera of the 200 MS patients (cases) and 56 (28.0%) sera of the 200 controls (OR = 3.94; 95% CI: 2.59–5.99; P < 0.001). Seroprevalence of T. gondii infection in MS patients increased significantly with increasing of age (P < 0.001). In the control group, no statistically significant differences were seen between the seroprevalence of T. gondii infection in various age groups (P = 0.858). Moreover, no statistically significant relationships were reported between the seropositivity to T. gondii and the sex for the cases and controls (P>0.05). Anti-T. gondii IgM antibodies were not detected in anti-T. gondii IgG positive patients.
 Conclusion: T. gondii infection might be a probability risk factor for MS. However, further studies are necessary to describe clearly the roles of T. gondii infection in MS.

Unbiased multiplex antigen screening of Cerebrospinal Fluid detects microbial and autoantigenic epitopes associated with Multiple Sclerosis

“…These observations seem to contradict some earlier reports of toxoplasma gondii being protective against MS 43,46 . There were also previous studies that did not find any association or even positive association with MS 58,48 . One possibility would be that certain epitopes of toxoplasma gondii do cause risk due to antibody cross-reactivity but the general population do not develop these cross-reactive antibodies from toxoplasma gondii infection.…”

“…The results from the toxoplasma gondii analysis suggest that toxoplasma gondii infection is associated with MS 44,48 . We perform this analysis because the detected ADRB3 epitope shared sequence homology with a toxoplasma gondii protein.…”

“…Because we detected the ADRB3 epitope to be homologous with a Toxoplasma gondii protein and there are numerous reports linking Toxoplasma gondii with MS [43][44][45][46][47][48] , we decided to also map the data with the entirety of the Toxoplasma gondii proteome (Table S9). From this analysis, we identified 7 additional epitopes in the Toxoplasma gondii proteome that were significantly associated with MS (Figure 4, Table 3, Figure S7, Table S10).…”