Zika Virus News: New Study Shows Disease 'Might' Cause Guillain-Barré Syndrome

A new study has determine that Zika virus is responsible for a spike in cases in Guillain-Barre syndrome, confirming what CDC officials reported earlier this year. "We have evidence that Zika is the cause of Guillain-Barre syndrome in those patients and that was not known before," lead study author Dr. Arnaud Fontanet, a medical epidemiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris said."We compared all three groups — those who had Guillain-Barre syndrome, those who were representative of the general population and those who had Zika infection without neurological complications."

The researchers found that 98 percent of the Guillain-Barre patients had antibodies to the mosquito-borne disease, suggesting they had been infected with the virus, compared with only 56 percent of the individuals in a control group that did not have the paralysis syndrome, CNN reports. “This is a compelling paper that provides a good deal of objective data to suggest an epidemiological link between recent Zika infection and increased risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome,” said Dr. Kenneth C. Gorson, professor of neurology at Tufts School of Medicine, “that’s huge, because it’s the first case-control study to establish a potential relationship between Zika virus infection and Guillain-Barré.”