Low vitamin D levels have long been linked to a higher risk of MS. Experts suspect an expectant mother’s lack of exposure to sunlight – the main source of vitamin D – may affect the fetus’s central nervous system or immune system, and predispose it to developing MS later in life.
In the Australian study, researchers combed birth records of 1,524 MS patients born between 1920 and 1950, and found there were more of them born in the months of November and December.
This means their first trimester occurred during the winter months of April to June, a time when expectant mothers in the southern hemisphere may prefer to be indoors to escape the cold.
- Just to keep in mind, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, you need to reverse these dates.
The Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF) was created to address the systemic problems in medical research and commercial drug development that work against the rapid delivery of patient treatments. The MRF’s Accelerated Research Collaboration™ (ARC™) model is a radical new process that recognizes the incentives and limitations of academic scientists, commercial biopharma, government regulators, and patients and their families, and fosters behavioral changes by adding tangible value to everyone. As a not-for profit organization, the Myelin Repair Foundation is uniquely positioned to serve as an intermediary among these players with the rapid delivery of patient treatments as its singular focus.
To demonstrate the ARC model, the Myelin Repair Foundation has made identifying myelin repair drug targets that will lead to treatments for multiple sclerosis its sole focus.
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We are joining the rest of Canadian cities in quest of medical equality for patients with MS. Please bring your family and friends. We need your support.
(edited to not be in ALL CAPS)
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To address this issue, a panel of nurses and physical therapists met in 2009 to discuss how to help improve the diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of walking impairment in people with multiple sclerosis. Their conclusions were published in the International Journal of MS Care in its Spring 2010 issue.
The panel members, led by June Halper, director of the International Organization of Multiple Sclerosis Nurses, and Amy Perrin Ross, neuroscience coordinator at Loyola University Medical Center in Illinois, noted that many patients and their care partners don’t even have a basic understanding of how multiple sclerosis progresses, relapses, and what impact it has on their walking. The panel emphasized that effective treatment of multiple sclerosis requires a multidisciplinary approach and effective communication between the patient and his or her healthcare team.
The reason people with multiple sclerosis and their care partners don’t speak to their physicians about their walking issues, says June Halper, is because rehabilitation specialists and physicians have minimal training in this area. “Even physicians,” she says, “have minimal experience or evidence upon which to base their practice on the value of walking, mobility and what to do to improve it. Education and information is vital to close that gap.”
The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada recently held two webcasts for the general public and the media on the topic of chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) and MS.
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A technology that makes a pioneering or profiteering clinic somewhere overseas a mere Google search away, the Internet is changing the nature of patient advocacy. It’s amping up the activism.
And those more activist patients, who share information and strategies through email, discussion boards and Facebook, are actually in some cases altering the research agenda in fields such as cancer, alternative medicine and now multiple sclerosis.
Some want access to experimental drugs or therapies before science has proven that they are safe or useful. In other cases, they are agitating for a say in which theories, techniques or treatments get research funding.
Using extremely fine-grained analytical tools, scientists compared genetic information in three sets of identical twins. Of each pair, one twin had MS, and the other didn’t — yet their genes proved essentially identical.
“We find no smoking gun on the genetic level,” said National Center for Genome Resources geneticist Stephen Kingsmore, coauthor of the study published April 28 in Nature.
The research cost $1.5 million, and the scientists took 18 months to sequence 2.8 billion DNA units in each twin, and determine whether they came from the mother or father. Most genomic comparisons look for differences in a just handful of suspect gene, and even whole-genome approaches don’t differentiate between parental contributions.
