Childhood Trauma Has This Effect on Multiple Sclerosis Childhood trauma could affect the trajectory of multiple sclerosis development and response to treatment in adulthood, according to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers, in Mice that had experienced stress when young were more likely to develop the autoimmune disorder and less likely to respond to a common treatment, the researchers suggest. However, treatment that activated an immune-cell receptor mitigated the effects of childhood stress in the mice. Previous work has shown that early-life trauma increases susceptibility to developing more severe MS, but researchers have not been able to determine how, Makoto Inoue, a professor of comparative biosciences at Illinois, shares.