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Researcher's labour of love leads to MS breakthrough
André Picard and Avis Favaro
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Nov. 20 2009, 9:07 PM EST
Last updated Thursday, Aug. 23 2012, 12:21 PM EDT
Elena Ravalli was a seemingly healthy 37-year-old when she began to experience strange attacks of vertigo, numbness, temporary vision loss and crushing fatigue. They were classic signs of multiple sclerosis, a potentially debilitating neurological disease.
It was 1995 and her husband, Paolo Zamboni, a professor of medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy, set out to help. He was determined to solve the mystery of MS - an illness that strikes people in the prime of their lives but whose causes are unknown and whose effective treatments are few.
More Related to this Story
Watch the W5 documentary on the groundbreaking new treatment
How has MS touched you?
What he learned in his medical detective work, scouring dusty old books and using ultra-modern imaging techniques, could well turn what we know about MS on its head: Dr. Zamboni's research suggests that MS is not, as widely believed, an autoimmune condition, but a vascular disease.
Share your stories Tell us what this potential breakthrough in multiple sclerosis treatment means to you
More radical still, the experimental surgery he performed on his wife offers hope that MS, which afflicts 2.5 million people worldwide, can be cured and even largely prevented.
"I am confident that this could be a revolution for the research and diagnosis of multiple sclerosis," Dr. Zamboni said in an interview.
Not everyone is so bullish: Skeptics warn the evidence is too scant and speculative to start rewriting medical textbooks. Even those intrigued by the theory caution that MS sufferers should not rush off to get the surgery - nicknamed the "liberation procedure" - until more research is done.
U.S. and Canadian researchers are trying to test Dr. Zamboni's premise.
For the Italian professor, however, the quest was both personal and professional and the results were stunning.
Fighting for his wife's health, Dr. Zamboni looked for answers in the medical literature. He found repeated references, dating back a century, to excess iron as a possible cause of MS. The heavy metal can cause inflammation and cell death, hallmarks of the disease. The vascular surgeon was intrigued - coincidentally, he had been researching how iron buildup damages blood vessels in the legs, and wondered if there could be a similar problem in the blood vessels of the brain.
Using ultrasound to examine the vessels leading in and out of the brain, Dr. Zamboni made a startling find: In more than 90 per cent of people with multiple sclerosis, including his spouse, the veins draining blood from the brain were malformed or blocked. In people without MS, they were not.
He hypothesized that iron was damaging the blood vessels and allowing the heavy metal, along with other unwelcome cells, to cross the crucial brain-blood barrier. (The barrier keeps blood and cerebrospinal fluid separate. In MS, immune cells cross the blood-brain barrier, where they destroy myelin, a crucial sheathing on nerves.)
More striking still was that, when Dr. Zamboni performed a simple operation to unclog veins and get blood flowing normally again, many of the symptoms of MS disappeared. The procedure is similar to angioplasty, in which a catheter is threaded into the groin and up into the arteries, where a balloon is inflated to clear the blockages. His wife, who had the surgery three years ago, has not had an attack since.
The researcher's theory is simple: that the underlying cause of MS is a condition he has dubbed "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency." If you tackle CCSVI by repairing the drainage problems from the brain, you can successfully treat, or better still prevent, the disease.
"If this is proven correct, it will be a very, very big discovery because we'll completely change the way we think about MS, and how we'll treat it," said Bianca Weinstock-Guttman, an associate professor of neurology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
The initial studies done in Italy were small but the outcomes were dramatic. In a group of 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS (the most common form) who underwent surgery, the number of active lesions in the brain fell sharply, to 12 per cent from 50 per cent; in the two years after surgery, 73 per cent of patients had no symptoms.
Source:
Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...love-leads-to-ms-breakthrough/article1372414/
André Picard and Avis Favaro
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Nov. 20 2009, 9:07 PM EST
Last updated Thursday, Aug. 23 2012, 12:21 PM EDT
Elena Ravalli was a seemingly healthy 37-year-old when she began to experience strange attacks of vertigo, numbness, temporary vision loss and crushing fatigue. They were classic signs of multiple sclerosis, a potentially debilitating neurological disease.
It was 1995 and her husband, Paolo Zamboni, a professor of medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy, set out to help. He was determined to solve the mystery of MS - an illness that strikes people in the prime of their lives but whose causes are unknown and whose effective treatments are few.
More Related to this Story
Watch the W5 documentary on the groundbreaking new treatment
How has MS touched you?
What he learned in his medical detective work, scouring dusty old books and using ultra-modern imaging techniques, could well turn what we know about MS on its head: Dr. Zamboni's research suggests that MS is not, as widely believed, an autoimmune condition, but a vascular disease.
Share your stories Tell us what this potential breakthrough in multiple sclerosis treatment means to you
More radical still, the experimental surgery he performed on his wife offers hope that MS, which afflicts 2.5 million people worldwide, can be cured and even largely prevented.
"I am confident that this could be a revolution for the research and diagnosis of multiple sclerosis," Dr. Zamboni said in an interview.
Not everyone is so bullish: Skeptics warn the evidence is too scant and speculative to start rewriting medical textbooks. Even those intrigued by the theory caution that MS sufferers should not rush off to get the surgery - nicknamed the "liberation procedure" - until more research is done.
U.S. and Canadian researchers are trying to test Dr. Zamboni's premise.
For the Italian professor, however, the quest was both personal and professional and the results were stunning.
Fighting for his wife's health, Dr. Zamboni looked for answers in the medical literature. He found repeated references, dating back a century, to excess iron as a possible cause of MS. The heavy metal can cause inflammation and cell death, hallmarks of the disease. The vascular surgeon was intrigued - coincidentally, he had been researching how iron buildup damages blood vessels in the legs, and wondered if there could be a similar problem in the blood vessels of the brain.
Using ultrasound to examine the vessels leading in and out of the brain, Dr. Zamboni made a startling find: In more than 90 per cent of people with multiple sclerosis, including his spouse, the veins draining blood from the brain were malformed or blocked. In people without MS, they were not.
He hypothesized that iron was damaging the blood vessels and allowing the heavy metal, along with other unwelcome cells, to cross the crucial brain-blood barrier. (The barrier keeps blood and cerebrospinal fluid separate. In MS, immune cells cross the blood-brain barrier, where they destroy myelin, a crucial sheathing on nerves.)
More striking still was that, when Dr. Zamboni performed a simple operation to unclog veins and get blood flowing normally again, many of the symptoms of MS disappeared. The procedure is similar to angioplasty, in which a catheter is threaded into the groin and up into the arteries, where a balloon is inflated to clear the blockages. His wife, who had the surgery three years ago, has not had an attack since.
The researcher's theory is simple: that the underlying cause of MS is a condition he has dubbed "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency." If you tackle CCSVI by repairing the drainage problems from the brain, you can successfully treat, or better still prevent, the disease.
"If this is proven correct, it will be a very, very big discovery because we'll completely change the way we think about MS, and how we'll treat it," said Bianca Weinstock-Guttman, an associate professor of neurology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
The initial studies done in Italy were small but the outcomes were dramatic. In a group of 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS (the most common form) who underwent surgery, the number of active lesions in the brain fell sharply, to 12 per cent from 50 per cent; in the two years after surgery, 73 per cent of patients had no symptoms.
Source:
Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...love-leads-to-ms-breakthrough/article1372414/
