MS research notes from American Academy of Neurology meeting

[shoshin]

http://www.acceleratedcure.org:8080/node/3205

(I hope this url lasts! After the standard wwwdot, it's acceleratedcure [.] org [:] 8080/node/3205)

This showed up in my blog reader the other week. It's pretty long, but there are some interesting tidbits so I thought maybe others might be interested.

One thing I thought was interesting was that someone tried to compare the results of a bunch of different clinical trials, but found it difficult because of variations like how the different studies defined a relapse (apparently, most of the later studies showed less relapses in part b/c relapses were defined more stringently). If the neuros can't agree on what a relapse is, how can we be expected to get it straight?

sho

[shoshin]

This was another one I found very interesting, about the comparison of white matter and gray matter atrophy in MS:

A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of Gray Matter
Atrophy in Multiple Sclerosis Patients Elizabeth Fisher,
Jar-Chi Lee, Kunio Nakamura, Richard Rudick

This study found that atrophy rates increase with disease progression
(like the last study). WM atrophy happened at a fairly constant rate
over the progression of MS (CIS->RRMS->SPMS) at about 3X the
rate of controls. GM atrophy, however, accelerates with disease
progression going from about 3X to 8X to 14X the rate of
controls. They found a moderate correlation between GM atrophy and
EDSS. WM atrophy correlated with GM atrophy in RRMS, but not in
SPMS. They conclude that MS appears to be a predominantly GM disease.

This has big implications for how drugs are developed and approved
given our previous bias that it was strictly a WM disease.

[6-paq]

Thanks for posting this.  I'll have to go take a look.

I can understand your point on comparing results.  I would think that in clinical trials for a specific disease that there would be a published standard for defining the measuring criteria!!!   But, of course, this disease is so unpredictable and non-standard!

Take care, Pat :)