New relief for cold sore sufferers is available. No, not a cure — but now, at least, anyone plagued by repeated bouts of the painful and annoying sores can have the satisfaction of blaming his parents.
Susceptibility to recurring sores is probably linked to genetics, according to the discovery of a team of researchers from the University of Utah School of Medicine and the Eccles Institute of Human Genetics, located on the U. campus. They traced the likely culprit to one of six genes on human Chromosome 21.
Herpes simplex virus 1 (in medical shorthand, HSV-1) is blamed for cold sores. Most people are exposed to this virus, but only a small proportion repeatedly break out with the sores.
Dr. John D. Kriesel, assistant research professor of internal medicine, said a defect in Chromosome 21 is probably to blame for repeat sores.
The team also includes Mark F. Leppert, co-chairman of the U. Department of Human Genetics; Dr. Spotswood L. Spruance, professor of internal medicine; Andreas Peiffer, research assistant professor of pediatrics; Brith Otterud, computer specialist; and Brandt Jones, senior lab specialist.
Leppert made the project possible, Kriesel told the Deseret News. Much of the work involved researching the Utah Genetics Reference Project, a database that Leppert has been accumulating of medical and genetic information about 45 extended families.
When the cold sore project began, the database did not record whether patients suffered from these painful and annoying facial sores. So the researchers sent out questionnaires to participants to find out if they were bothered by the sores and had questions about cold sores added to the forms that future database participants would submit.
Researchers needed to spell out the difference between canker sores and cold sores.
"A canker sore is typically a painful little ulceration that occurs on your tongue, on your gums or on the inside of your lips, whereas a cold sore typically occurs on the outside of your lip, on your nose or on your face," Kriesel explained.
Cold sores are caused by the HSV-1 virus. As far as researchers know, canker sores aren't due to viral infection.
After participants in the database responded, the scientists used a computerized search to find out if those who are victims of repeated cold sores have any genetic markers in common. The analysis showed a region on Chromosome 21, including six genes, probably is linked to cold sores. Likelihood of a linkage was estimated at 2,500 to 1.
The next project is to "figure out which of the genes is really doing the trick," he said. The team has a proposal with the National Institutes of Health, seeking funding for the study.
They hope to find a gene that causes susceptibility to repeated cold sores when it shows up in one form, and resistance to cold sores when it is different.
Later, they will search for a tie-in with more dangerous types of herpes, ocular and genital herpes.
People with ocular herpes "essentially have cold sores on their eye, in their cornea," he said. "It can make some people go blind."
Likewise, some people who are exposed to genital herpes never get outbreaks of the sores. Kriesel has a hunch that the same kind of genetic effect is involved.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com