I give you something that is not MS COVID (p.s. thats below). Laurson-Doube J, Rijke N, Helme A, Baneke P, Banwell B, Viswanathan S, Hemmer B, Yamout B. Ethical use of off-label disease-modifying therapies for multiple sclerosis. Mult Scler. 2021 Jul 26:13524585211030207. doi: 10.1177/13524585211030207. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34304636 Background: Off-label disease-modifying therapies...
SIZOMUS randomized clinical trial is on the roll
SIZOMUS anti-plasma cell RCT I’m happy to notify that SIZOMUS (Safety of IxaZOmib targeting plasma cells in Multiple Sclerosis) is re-commencing after MHRA approval. This follows a pre-planned interim safety analysis. MHRA stands for Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and without their say so this trial would not have been able to proceed. The Medicines and...
Please, please, please #GetVaccinatedASAP
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★ (Black & White Friday) As the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is surging it is putting residents of Whitechapel at serious risk of getting COVID-19. This is important because the vaccination rate in Whitechapel is so low; less than 30% of adults have both dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Why is the uptake of vaccines so low in our local community? Vaccine hesitancy...
73 tomorrow – some achievement
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★★ (Today’s colours are NHS blue & yellow #005EB8 & #FAE100) Tomorrow the NHS turns 73. If you love the NHS and want to give it and its staff a present please have your COVID-19 vaccine. Barts Health NHS Trust and many other NHS services are running walk-in vaccine centres. 📣Roll-up, roll-up! Or should we say ‘walk-in, walk-in’! 🚶🏽 🚶🏼♀️ 🚶🏿♀️ 🚶...
Ask not
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★ (black&white) I once proposed the question, “ask not what your healthcare professional (HCP) or MS research community can do for you, but what you can do for yourself?” and had quite a lot of pushback from some readers. Why? I started developing this diagram more than a decade ago summarising the holistic management of MS. What I mean by this is that if...
Second opinion
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: zero-★s (black Monday; playing roulette with your patients’ brains) I recently saw a patient for a second opinion. He was about to start dimethyl fumarate (DMF), but his wife who had spent a lot of time reading about MS wanted him to be treated with something more effective. She had read the MS-Blog (formerly the Barts-MS Blog) and wanted him to have a higher...
CURE-3
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★★ (still seeing red, despite Summer having finally arrived) I am considering retraining as a medical philosopher. The thinking of the MS research community is riddled with fundamental errors that could be sorted out by applying basic philosophical principles. One example is the diagnostic tautology we are wedded to in how we define MS as a disease. Another...
Am I cured?
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★★ (seeing purple; a Sunday morning purple) Could you imagine if we made the treatment target in MS a cure? This is a very contentious issue; however, based on the current dogma that MS is an autoimmune disease driven by rogue autoreactive cells we should have the ability to either purge these cells from the body or imprison them via tolerance mechanisms...
Patient involvement, or not
Where is the patient involvement in designing the DMT guidelines for Multiple Sclerosis? According to the NHS: ‘People and communities are important to us because they help us improve all aspects of health care, including patient safety, patient experience and health outcomes – giving people the power to live healthier lives.’ The NHS England algorithm for using DMT’s says: ‘The...
Tickled pink
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★ (seeing pink; tickled pink) Thank you for completing yesterday’s poll. It is quite clear that you, our blog readers, want us to prioritise the following changes to the way we prescribe DMTs in the NHS. The most important priority is for pwMS to access immune reconstitution therapies (alemtuzumab, cladribine and HSCT) early as 1st-line therapies for active MS...