ALS Autoimmune

I was recently diagnosed with ALS. I have heard of an an experimental trial involving using a one time cytoxin infusion to initially lower the tcell count and then interleukin-2 injections over 3 months to essentially boost the tcell account. Any thoughts on the science behind this from an autoimmune perspective?

[Garth L Nicolson, PhD]

Sorry, I am not familiar with that approach. What is the rationale of reducing T cells and then stimulating their synthesis?  This approach would depend completely on an exclusive cytotoxic T cell mechanism of midbrain destruction.

This subject brings to mine our own research on ALS where we found that 100% of Gulf War veterans with ALS and 85% of civilians with ALS had a specific brain infection.  This was published in the Journal of Clinical Neurosciences (Nicolson GL, Berns P, Nasralla M, Haier J, Pomfret J. High frequency of systemic mycoplasmal infections in Gulf War veterans and civilians with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). J Clin Neurosci 2002; 9:525-529).

This suggested that IV treatment of such infections might reverse ALS.  That didn't happen, of course, but at least progression was halted (until the end of the trial, which happened to be too short to have any lasting effect).