Overloaded brain cleanup cells may mark severe multiple sclerosis progression

Researcher Daan van der Vliet, together with colleagues from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Leiden University, and Utrecht University, has discovered an important mechanism that may be linked to severe progression of multiple sclerosis (MS). In brain tissue from patients with rapidly progressing MS, they found large numbers of abnormal immune cells overloaded with fat droplets. The study offers new leads for treatments as well as biomarkers that could better predict disease progression. The work is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.