MS Ping!
Please FReepmail me if you would like to be added to, or removed from, the Multiple Sclerosis ping list...
Posted on 09/21/2006 12:44:50 PM PDT by Nachum
Vitamin shots may help protect multiple sclerosis patients from severe long-term disability, a study suggests.
Currently, there is no effective treatment for the chronic progressive phase of MS, when serious disability is most likely to appear.
Researchers cut the risk of nerve degeneration in mice with MS-type symptoms by giving them a form of vitamin B3 called nicotinamide.
The Children's Hospital Boston study appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.
MS, which affects about 85,000 people in the UK, is a disease of the central nervous system.
It causes the break down of the myelin sheath, a fatty protein, which coats nerve fibres, disrupting the ability to conduct electrical impulses to and from the brain.
Many patients develop a form of the disease called relapsing-remitting MS, in which bouts of illness are followed by complete or partial recovery. In this early phase anti-inflammatory drugs can help.
But eventually patients can enter the chronic progressive phase, for which there is no good treatment.
Women are twice as likely to be affected by MS as men
The Boston team worked on mice with an MS-like disease called experimental autoimmune encephalitis (EAE).
They found that daily nicotinamide shots protected the animals' nerve cells from myelin loss, and stabilised the condition of those cells that had already been affected.
The greater the dose of nicotinamide, the greater the protective effect.
Rating disability on a scale of one to five, mice receiving the highest doses of nicotinamide scored between one and two, while animals who received no shots at all scored between three and four.
Key chemical
The researchers found that nicotinamide boosted levels of a crucial chemical called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) in the animals' nervous systems.
Nicotinamide also significantly reduced neurological deficits even when treatment was delayed until 10 days after the induction of EAE - raising hope that it will also be effective in the later stages of MS.
Lead researcher Dr Shinjiro Kaneko said: "The earlier therapy was started, the better the effect, but we hope nicotinamide can help patients who are already in the chronic stage."
The researchers said nicotinamide was cheap, and thought to have few side effects.
However, they said further work was needed to test its effect on humans.
Simon Gillespie, chief executive of the MS Society, said: "Any potential treatment for reducing the chronic progression of disability in MS deserves pursuing.
"This is interesting early research which we should like to see developed, adding our usual caution that what works in mice does not always work in men."
A spokesperson for the MS Trust said: "These are interesting results, but studies in mice with the experimental equivalent of MS may not necessarily translate into a successful treatment for people with MS."
Thanks.
They found that daily nicotinamide shots
More shots!
Please FReepmail me if you would like to be added to, or removed from, the Multiple Sclerosis ping list...
Yes thanks!
Sounds like a way to get further fed funding. We need the money to research why global warming causes colder oceans. Yeah...that will work.
scratch my comment..my bad for clicking the wrong thread.
The Proper Care and Feeding of the Free Republic Keyword Feature.
I pledge to be better about the keywords. Thanks for the link.
No worries. :) I'm guilty of doing that kind of thing ALL THE TIME not long ago. I got wise when I started using keywords to my advantage and cataloging/archiving threads for my various ping lists.
Plus - once, some of the "old timers" let me have it when I posted something and said I "searched keywords" rather than just "searched." LOL - they can be touchy.
Take heavy oral doses of the vitamin. It is cheap and is safe, assuming that you are otherwise taking adequate vitamins and supplements. B vitamins are water soluble and any excess tends to be quickly excreted out. I have recently found that taking heavy doses of nicotinamide orally helped greatly with a nasty case of shingles. Fatigue increased in the short term, but that seems to be a matter of healing as the shingles pain virtually disappeared -- a clear sign of recovery.
We are going to beat this.
PS I just read Stephen White's latest book. Have you read his books?
Very interesting. Thanks for the pings.
More than 80 percent of patients taking the drug were found not to have active inflammation according to medical imaging scans. The company also said that patients who had been given a placebo for the first six months of the study showed a marked improvement after they were switched to the treatment, an improvement that was sustained out to the 24th month of the study.
Novartis developed FTY720 after licensing the compound from Mitsubishi Pharma. The oral drug is currently in late-stage clinical trials.
This is an article on FOX NEWS. I do not know how to ping the email list. It said that 77% did not have any relapses for two years. Please forward to the MS ping list.
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Thanks Coleus.
Adult Stem Cells Successfully Reset Immune System for Multiple Sclerosis Patients
LifeNews | January 29, 2009 | Steven Ertelt
Posted on 01/31/2009 3:30:36 AM PST by GonzoII
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2175525/posts
This time last year my husband was suffering from a bad case of shingles, wish we had known about this then. He is OK now.
Too late for my sis in the UK. Whatta nasty disease. We’d have had it licked a long time ago if he hadn’t dropped $$$ billions into fashionable pederast venereal diseases.
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