Potential New Treatment for MS Being Used Worldwide

Individuals diagnosed with multiple sclerosis understand the chronic and increasingly debilitating symptoms and limitations the disease produces. Multiple sclerosis is defined as a neurological disease where the body attacks its own nerve cells. A substance called myelin coats the nerves and nerve cells much like the plastic coating that covers electrical wires. With multiple sclerosis, this protective covering known as myelin is attacked by the body. As the myelin sheath and myelin protective coating is damaged or destroyed, nerve damage occurs, which in turn causes potential damage to multiple body function.

Stunning Proposal Can Change Attitudes Regarding Cause of MS
To date, medical researchers have believed that multiple sclerosis is primarily an autoimmune disease, as the body itself appears to attack the nerves and nerve cells, decreasing the amount of myelin protecting those nerves. However, in 2009, an Italian doctor from the University of Ferrara published initial findings that proposed a completely different cause for the disease. In his paper, Dr. Paolo Zamboni proposed that chronic cerebral spinal venous insufficiency directly contributed to the damage to the nervous system in multiple sclerosis patients.

According to his paper, Dr. Zamboni performed a study with 65 of his patients. Because his proposal literally rocked the multiple sclerosis world, Dr. Zamboni was invited to speak with National Multiple Sclerosis Society research leaders in the United States and at the American Academy of Neurology in 2010.

Dr. Zamboni's proposal has encouraged a flurry of activity in multiple sclerosis research, potential treatments and procedures. Dr. Zamboni has recommended that multiple sclerosis be treated with an endovascular surgical technique very similar to cardiac balloon angioplasty that involves the insertion of a small balloon attached to the tip of a catheter that is inserted into a blocked vein, inflated, and serves to widen narrowed or blocked arteries to enhance blood flow.

Funding Research
Research into such a groundbreaking idea as to the true causes of nerve damage in multiple sclerosis patients has caused a ripple around the world; international organizations and experts in multiple sclerosis have begun its new studies in this topic. Because of the unprecedented potential of this discovery, leading multiple sclerosis organizations around the world have funded expedited studies in review processes. More than $2.5 million in donations from the United States and Canada alone have funded over half a dozen grants that focus on the study of CCSVI and its relation to the multiple sclerosis disease process.

Such studies will serve to review the study steps engaged by Dr. Zamboni as well as to resolve a number of data produced by his studies, some with conflicting results. Studies will focus on the frequency of CCSVI in multiple sclerosis patients, as well as how many patients experience the conditions that have not been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

To date, multiple sclerosis societies and international committees have funded nearly $3.5 million in the study, clinical trials, and research into chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency and its relation to multiple sclerosis. Currently at the University at Buffalo, researchers are undergoing a placebo-controlled trials involving over two-dozen individuals diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.

Grants offered through the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in the United States and the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada are funding seven such projects, focusing on how CCSVI made directly contribute to multiple sclerosis disease activity, function and decline.

Moving Forward
While CCSVI treatments and clinical trials in the United States are still undergoing studies, other countries are currently offering CCVSI treatments and procedures with promising results.  Because the condition and its treatment approach is still relatively new, MS patients are cautioned to take the time to study not only their condition, but how chronic cerebral spinal venous insufficiency may directly relate to multiple sclerosis.

Understand what these conditions are, how they have been treated by others around the world, and obtain test and study results from more than one doctor or research facility before agreeing to treatment until more information is discovered and results published.

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