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| Sat Jul 29, 2006 11:39 pm Hope for MS Patients |
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EDITORIAL: Hope for MS Patients
By Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Jul. 28--Multiple sclerosis baffles all it touches -- medical professionals, victims and victims' families and friends.
An immune system gone awry, it is believed, destroys the nerves' insulation so electrical impulses from the brain can't reach their destinations. MS more often strikes people of northern European ancestry, young adults, whites and women. But it seems not to have a single cause or a genetic link.
And it strikes its victims differently. Some endure brief attacks but otherwise live mostly normal lives. Some gradually lose, over many years, their ability to move. Some deal both with gradual decline and occasional rapid plunges en route to an immobile fate.
Recent years, though, have offered some hope to the approximately 400,000 Americans with MS. The hope lies in drug regimens that have somehow restored function to some patients' muscles -- such as Karen Ayres, a Briton in her 20s who was rendered a quadriplegic four years ago but now is walking and lives a normal life.
Ayres was one of 27 patients in a promising British trial recently reported by the Associated Press. They started by taking a brief course of mitoxantrone, a potent but risky anti-cancer drug, before switching to the slower-acting Copaxone, already in use to treat forms of MS that feature relapses.
The results were so encouraging that, according to Liverpool researcher Mike Boggild, "Patients who were just the worst of the worst did remarkably well." A three-year study now is planned.
Drug cocktails are believed to hold great prospects for fighting MS symptoms. The Holy Grail, one imagines, would be a drug or drugs that greatly boost the body's limited ability to regenerate the fatty nerve sheathing, called myelin, that MS eats away. Even then, an actual cure might involve multiple types of therapies to help all types of MS patients.
The Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha takes part in the worldwide battle against this most frustrating disease. It's believed that MS has been with humanity throughout history. May the day of its extinction soon be near.
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To see more of the Omaha World-Herald, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.omaha.com.
Copyright (c) 2006, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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