Researchers say they’ve found a link between high blood pressure and multiple sclerosis that could pave the way for less expensive treatment of MS.

A study of the brain tissue of people with MS found elevated levels of an enzyme that produces the hormone angiotensin, which is known to cause high blood pressure.

So researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine tested whether a blood pressure drug that blocks production of angiotensin would improve symptoms in mice with brain lesions similar to multiple sclerosis. It worked.

The drug — lisinopril — reversed paralysis in mice that had developed MS-like symptoms, according to findings published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s possible that lisinopril, sold as Zestril and Prinivil, could do the same in people at a fraction of the cost of drugs already used to treat multiple sclerosis, said Stanford’s Dr. Lawrence Steinman, the study’s lead author and a leading expert on multiple sclerosis.

Clinical trials are needed to prove the results, Steinman said.

But, he said, “We were able to show that all the targets for lisinopril are there and ready for therapeutic manipulation in the multiple-sclerosis lesions of human patients.”

Dr. William Karpus, a professor of pathology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who studies autoimmune diseases, said the results of the new study “have major implications” because “this is a system that has not been thought to be involved in multiple sclerosis before.”