Lady, did you know . . .

Top 2007 Health Breakthroughs for Women

Let's face it. We live in a time when a "Your Friends Make You Fat" story gets headlined and blogged 24-7 (no matter that it was just one study in a doctors' journal), while the recent discovery of two (two!) genes linked to multiple sclerosis (MS) rates nary a peep.

19. Multiple sclerosis: New genetic clues

For the first time in more than 30 years, researchers from the International Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Genetics Consortium have discovered genetic clues to why certain people -- usually women between ages 20 and 40 -- develop MS, a severe autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own nerve cells over time. The new genes, labeled IL-2 and IL-7, are associated with interleukin (IL), a substance that helps direct T cells to fight cellular invaders. For many of the estimated 400,000 MS patients in the United States, early clues to diagnosis (a stumble here, fatigue and a finger or foot weakness there) often go unnoticed. As a result, treatment is often delayed, and the disease is misdiagnosed. And while these two genes (IL-2 and IL-7) hardly tell the whole story of associated nerve degeneration (followed by possible loss of sight, memory, and brain power), they at the least "give us a working hypothesis for what may be causing MS," says David Hafler, M.D., a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School's Center for Neurological Diseases. They also hold out hope for better treatment: Once researchers find and understand such genes, better drugs to tame incurable MS are far more likely to be found.