Just want to mention that there is
previous work on risks of MS relapse associated with vaccination. While they concluded there was no such risk, it leaves the possibility of a low risk open. They also specifically looked for a difference in response to different vaccines, and did not find it. How you can tell relapse of preclinical disease from initial onset is a problem.
The existence of subclinical MS is a problem I just ran into in trying to determine if survivors of different types of lymphoma had increased or decreased risks of MS. (I had hoped this would give insight into the role of different parts of the immune system.) A local clinic treating MS patients reports that 20% of their patients do not actually meet strict official diagnostic criteria. N.B. these are patients who actually went to a doctor specializing in MS, not patients with preclinical disease found in a sample of the general population. There could be greater numbers with unreported preclinical disease.
To me this indicates substantial diagnostic ambiguity about the prevalence of preclinical MS. This ambiguity is large enough to confound results in a wide range of studies of proposed treatments. This is a special problem in cases where early intervention might prevent development of the full disease. All the patients who respond might be eliminated from a rigorous study. The other distressing possibility is that patients who respond to early intervention in preclinical disease of unknown etiology could have a different condition entirely.
This is a major problem affecting MS research.
This quoted statement fits another theme of mine:
Vaccination of any type was associated with an increased risk of CNS ADS onset within the first 30 days after vaccination only in younger (<50 years) individuals
(my bolding)
Please note that contamination, being an unintended inclusion, does not consistently appear in any single type of vaccine. When it happens (and yes it does happen) it can be traced to particular processes, manufacturers, facilities and lot numbers. (The big exception to this comes from reuse of unsterilized needles, for which no effort in manufacturing can compensate. This is contamination at the very end of the delivery pipeline.) When you see that the effects do not even depend on the type of vaccine, and there are many, let alone the lot number, you have a strong indication you are dealing with a problem in immune response that existed prior to vaccination.
Some kinds of preclinical conditions are so strongly associated with MS that they make it very difficult to get insurance, due to the risk of permanent disability. I know a person who went 20 years without insurance because of recurrent attacks of optic neuritis. This ties in with
a recent post on NMO. If you can't distinguish preclinical disease, you don't know if you are looking at something causing the disease, or simply a non-specific stressor that contributed to a relapse. MS is notorious for the variety of such stressors with no clear tie to etiology, including normal pregnancies.
I'll admit you could not only reduce the risk of MS, but completely eliminate the disease by avoiding all pregnancies, but see some drawbacks to that approach.
