“We recommend that our patients should be as active as possible, keeping in mind that they need to be safe, whatever the activity,” says Trudy Campbell, one of only three nurse practitioners in Canada specializing in working with multiple sclerosis patients.
“Exercise, learning strategies to cope with stress, adequate nutrition, maintaining an ideal body weight and family support all play a role in living with MS,” she says. “Most important of all are being informed about the disease, having the appropriate health care team to assist with its management and learning to prioritize tasks and budget one’s energy to cope most effectively with whatever has to be done in a day.”
Research at the University of Colorado Boulder may lead to a drug that would address both the pain and paralysis of multiple sclerosis, or MS.
The obvious symptoms of MS are tremors and paralysis. But the majority of people with MS also suffer from chronic pain, for which there are currently no available drugs, says Linda Watkins, a distinguished professor of Neuroscience at CU. So her team set out to test chronic pain treatments and what they found exceeded their expectations.
“What was surprising was that they had such dramatic effects on arresting and reversing paralysis as well,” says Watkins.
They found a single injection of an anti-inflammatory drug into the spines of rats stopped MS-related paralysis for weeks at a time. That research in Watkins laboratory was led by Lisa Loram, a senior research associate.
An Ontario man with multiple sclerosis died of complications after a controversial treatment in Costa Rica to open up his neck veins, CBC News has learned.
Mahir Mostic, 35, of St. Catharines died on Oct. 19, one day after doctors in the Central American country tried to dissolve a blood-clot complication.
“We didn’t find exactly what happened with Mahir, but I mean it was very terrible story for us,” vascular surgeon Dr. Marcial Fallas of Clinica Biblica in San Jose said Thursday.
“He was a person that was looking [for] some way to improve his life. He found that for a short period of time his life improved.”
After Mostic paid $30,000 to go to Costa Rica for treatment in late June, he was operated on three times to have a mesh stent inserted to prop open a vein in his neck.
Several Canadians with multiple sclerosis who underwent the controversial ‘liberation treatment’ overseas have developed serious complications stemming from stents that were inserted after the operations.
The whole CCSVI issue is clouded by conflict of interest. Conflict of interest in this case is when a researcher, research group, or commentator have a vested interest in the subject under study and are therefore potentially biased. Conflict of interest can come from many sources; it is commonly financial, such as when a researcher stands to profit from the product being researched (such as when a drug company conducts a clinical trial of a new agent they have developed); but conflict of interest can also be related to career advancement, or prestige, or relationships that researchers have.
For instance with CCSVI, Zamboni has a clear conflict of interest in that his wife has MS. I understand that conflict perfectly, given that my mother died of MS. Personally, I find that such a conflict of interest can be very helpful, in that it often makes the researcher very passionate about the research, and more likely to persevere in the face of adversity. But it can cloud the judgement of the researcher; I am aware that to some extent my conflict of interest produces a bias towards research that supports things that can be actively done to improve outcome, like diet, exercise, meditation, etc, whereas I tend to be biased against research that suggests such interventions are not helpful. But I try hard to remain objective. Zamboni may well have similar bias towards finding a cure, and towards vascular techniques, and this may subtly influence his assessment of ultrasound scans, for example, when he knows that the person being scanned has MS. Those of us who use ultrasound daily know just how subjective and operator-dependent the interpretation of these scans is.
It is estimated that more than 400,000 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which affects the nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. Moreover, MS–like juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease–is the number one cause of paralysis in children. No one yet knows what causes the degenerative and progressive malady, but it is believed everyone may have the capability to contract it. Although there have been astounding leaps forward in the creation of treatment options, there is still no cure. Those figures and facts represent but a handful of the topics Harvard neurologist Weiner, founder-director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses in what ends up as a deconstruction of the last 30 years of his own and general MS research and of experience in treating patients with the puzzling disorder. A noted authority and a pretty good writer, Weiner deftly summarizes what is currently known about treatments and the potential for a cure.
