Cytomegalovirus primary infection in a patient with multiple sclerosis treated with alemtuzumab. Aguirre C, Meca-Lallana V, Sánchez P, Vivancos J.M ult Scler Relat Disord. 2019;5:270-271. This comes as no relevation to anyone. One person I know who had alemtuzumab described themselves as “fungus mungus” because of the infections that can occur when you have no T or B cells...
#ThinkSocial – work, work, work
The following is an excerpt from the executive summary of ‘Health and Work Champions: a Pilot Training Programme’, (Martin et al. Feb 2018). I am highlighting it because it has relevance to MSers and MS-related HCPs. HCPs are being fingered as part of the unemployment problem; “healthcare practitioners, who may consider that giving advice to refrain from work is part of...
MSology Masterclass
We still have places left for this year’s MSology MasterClass from the 6th-8th November. The Multiple Sclerosis Academy aims to train healthcare professionals with a specialist interest in multiple sclerosis. If you are interested in joining the Academy and attending the MasterClass please register your interest via this LINK. This course is not only for HCPs from the UK we welcome international...
B cells and the Boob Part II
So I have taken a bit of a kicking, as I rightly did not comment on the long-term experience with rituximab in non-MS conditions and cancer is not a particular problem, so I do not want to scare you. However I can go back to ocrelizumab and give you thier take and the risks of cancer are small and that is the case for Breast cancer too. As you can see in many ways the risks are no different from...
B cells and the Boob
If you rememeber one of the potential side effects of cladribine was thought to be cancer. We looked at this and the occurrance of cancer was not really more than the effect of life. Two years in a trial is rather short to assess the cancr risk.This will show itself with time. However removing large parts of your immune system is going to increase the risk..Never the less, this European-derived...
Do you want a cure?
MSers want a cure. However, even if we have an MS cure in hand we may not prevent or reverse progressive disease. How can this be? Focal inflammation damages nerves in two ways. It can shred and destroy nerve fibres as part of the initial inflammatory stage (acute neurodegeneration) or it can damage nerves and leave them functioning, but the resulting damage primes them to die off in the future;...
Chronic lesion activity in MS as seen on MRI
If you’d asked an year ago on whether I though MRI had a role beyond diagnosis in MS? My answer would have been an emphatic ‘NO’. The Achilles heel of MRI has always been the difficulty of standardizing scanning techniques to a large scale population level and adapting these accurately to work seamlessly during the day-to-day shortcomings of clinical imaging facilities within...
#ThinkSocial
At Barts-MS we #ThinkSocial. We hypothesise that MS is like other chronic diseases and is affected by social capital and the social determinants of disease (SDOD). In short, if you have high social capital you will have a better outcome and if you have a favourable social profile you will also do better regardless of the type of MS you have. We are now actively researching these issues and have...
Guest post: Multiple Sclerosis from a researcher’s perspective
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an incurable neurological disorder that is characterized by the loss of specialized functional cells in our brain. Oligodendrocytes are one of these specialized cell types that play an important role in MS. They produce a fatty substance called myelin, which is produced in large sheaths that are tightly wrapped around our nerve cells. Myelin is essential for providing...
Envy – will we ever be in a position to prevent MS?
On the 5th August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) to teplizumab (anti-CD3) for the prevention or delay of clinical type 1 diabetes (T1D) in individuals at risk of developing the disease. This is quite amazing and has implications way beyond T1D. The question in relation to anti-CD3 treatment is this ‘true prevention’ or simply a disease...