Mar
23
WASHINGTON — Under intense pressure from patients, some U.S. doctors are cautiously testing a provocative theory that abnormal blood drainage from the brain may play a role in multiple sclerosis — and that a surgical vein fix might help.
If it pans out, the approach suggested by a researcher in Italy could mark a vast change for MS, a disabling neurological disease long blamed on an immune system gone awry. But many patients frustrated by today’s limited therapies say they don’t have time to await the carefully controlled studies needed to prove if it really works and are searching out vein-opening treatment now — undeterred by one report of a dangerous complication.
“This made sense and I was hell-bent on doing it,” says Nicole Kane Gurland of Bethesda, Md., the first to receive the experimental treatment at Washington’s Georgetown University Hospital, which is set to closely track how a small number of patients fare before and after using a balloon to widen blocked veins.
In Buffalo, N.Y., more than 1,000 people applied for 30 slots in a soon-to-start study of that same angioplasty procedure. When the University at Buffalo team started a larger study a few months ago just to compare if bad veins are more common in MS patients than in healthy people — not to treat them — more than 13,000 patients applied.
The demand worries Georgetown neurologist Dr. Carlo Tornatore, who teamed with vascular surgeon Dr. Richard Neville in hopes of getting some evidence to guide his own patients’ care.”A lot of people are starting to go to fly-by-night places,” says Tornatore. Doing this research takes time, he said. “It’s a marathon, not a 100-yard sprint. We have to be very careful.”
read the rest via The Associated Press: Testing new MS theory as patients demand care now.
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Mar
4
Researchers find further evidence linking Epstein-Barr virus and risk of multiple sclerosis
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Boston, MA – Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and a team of collaborators have observed for the first time that the risk of multiple sclerosis MS increases by many folds following infection with the Epstein-Barr virus EBV. This finding implicates EBV as a contributory cause to multiple sclerosis. The study appears in an advance online edition of the journal Annals of Neurology and will appear in a later print edition.
Hundred of thousands of individuals not infected with EBV were followed up for several years through repeated blood samples collections. Researchers were then able to determine the time when individuals developed an EBV infection and its relation to MS onset. “The recruitment of individuals before they were infected with EBV and following up with them for several years is the critical methodological aspect that makes this study qualitatively different from all previous work,” said Alberto Ascherio, senior author of the study and professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
MS is a chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Women are more likely than men to get the disease and it is the most common neurologically disabling disease in young adults. Although genetic predisposition plays an important role in determining susceptibility, past studies have shown that environmental factors are equally important.
EBV is a herpes virus and one of the most common human viruses worldwide. Infection in early childhood is common and usually asymptomatic. Late age at infection, however, often causes infectious mononucleosis. In the U.S., upwards of 95% of adults are infected with the virus, but free of symptoms. EBV has been associated with some types of cancer and can cause serious complications when the immune system is suppressed, for example, in transplant recipients. There is no effective treatment for EBV.
Read the rest via Researchers find further evidence linking Epstein-Barr virus and risk of multiple sclerosis.