 |
| Click to visit My End to MS blog |
MS DIGEST – Dec. 29, 2014 – MS patients who underwent stem cell transplants had sustained remission of their active relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) and had improvements in nerve function three after the procedure, researchers report.
The study called Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation for Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis (HALT-MS) study was designed to look at the safety and effectiveness of treating MS patients with high-dose immunosuppressive therapy followed by an infusion of their on blood-making stem cells. The report was published online in JAMA Neurology.
A total of 25 patients underwent the procedure and results showed that 78.4 percent of them survived with no death or disease from a loss of neurologic function, clinical relapse or new lesions observed on imaging through three years after the treatment. Overall 90.9 percent survived that long with no progression of their disease, and 86.3 percent survived for three years with no relapse.
Prior to performing the transplant, patients are given chemotherapy to destroy their immune systems a procedure called immunoablative therapy, and the patient is then “rescued” with an infusion of their own blood-making stem cells. The theory is that newly transplanted stem cells won’t carrying the immunologic memory that caused the autoimmune attack in the first place and so they should be able to make new, healthy immune cells that don’t attack myelin.
In an accompanying editorial, M. Mateo Paz Soldán, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and Brian G. Weinshenker, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., tempered optimism about the aggressive therapy noting that deaths have occurred, even in small studies, and aggressive regimens have resulted in lymphomas associated with Epstein-Barr virus.
No comments:
Post a Comment