Encouraging Health

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U.S. researchers have reversed multiple sclerosis symptoms in early stage patients by using bone marrow stem cell transplants to reset the immune system, they said on Thursday.

Some 81 percent of patients in the early phase study showed signs of improvement with the treatment, which used chemotherapy to destroy the immune system, and injections of the patient’s bone marrow cells taken beforehand to rebuild it.

“We just start over with new cells from the stem cells,” said Dr. Richard Burt of Northwestern University in Chicago, whose study appears in the journal Lancet Neurology.

His approach is aimed at turning back the clock to a time before the immune system began attacking itself.

Burt said the approach — called autologous non-myeloablative hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation — is a bit gentler than the therapy used in cancer patients because rather than destroying the entire bone marrow, it attacks just the immune system component of the marrow, making it less toxic.

Burt and colleagues tried the treatment on 21 patients aged 20 to 53 with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, an earlier stage in the disease in which symptoms come and go.

Patients in the study were not helped by at least six months of standard treatment with interferon beta.

An experimental drug and a standard leukemia drug both show promise in advancing the treatment of MS, according to two new studies.

Two separate studies examined the usefulness of the experimental drug oral fumarate, and the leukemia drug alemtuzumab, in treating multiple sclerosis, reported Forbes magazine.

The standard leukemia drug alemtuzumab, or Campath, in particular may be “the most promising and most significant MS treatment yet discovered,” reported Voice of America, as it seems to halt the disease in its early stages and repair damaged functioning in patients.

“The ability of an MS drug to promote brain repair is unprecedented,” said Alasdair Coles of Cambridge University, who worked on the alemtuzumab study, according to Forbes. “We are witnessing a drug which, if given early enough, might effectively stop the advancement of the disease and also restore lost function by promoting repair of the damaged brain tissue.”

Multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease of the central nervous system, affects about 300,000 people in the United States. The disease causes the body’s immune system to attack the insulating layer of tissue that protects nerve fibers in the spinal cord and brain. Symptoms of the disease include muscle weakness, blurred vision, impaired walking, depression and paralysis.

In a three-year study involving 334 subjects at Cambridge University, alemtuzumab was found to be about 70 percent more effective in treating the disease than interferon beta, the standard MS drug already in wide use. But patients also suffered serious side effects, such as bleeding disorders, an increased risk of thyroid disease and infections, and scientists say more research must be done before it can be prescribed to treat the disease. The drug temporarily depletes white blood cells and is part of a group of drugs called monoclonal antibodies.

The study found that the treatment caused brain lesions to disappear and brain volume to grow, according to MRIs performed on study participants. Tony Johnson, a patient in the study, was able to continue playing professional golf after the treatment and is now winning tournaments, reported New Scientist.