30 years of research in multiple sclerosis
Great progress has been made in 30 years! We can now establish a diagnosis much faster and we can implement increasingly effective early treatment...
FIGHTing MS THROUGH RESEARCH
Great progress has been made in 30 years! We can now establish a diagnosis much faster and we can implement increasingly effective early treatment...
It illustrates the complexity and time it takes to complete innovative work, the development of new technical tools, the creation of new therapeutic concepts, feasibility tests using experimental animal models, and, finally the “full scale” trials on people and human diseases. Piet Stinissen quite rightly reminds us that some new treatments of MS use monoclonal antibodies, whose discovery dates back to 1975, and which earned Köhler and Milstein the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Vitamin D deficiency is frequent in Northern Europe as 90% of Vitamin D is synthesized in the skin under the effect of the sun’s ultraviolet irradiation. Low Vitamin D blood levels in childhood and adolescence are a factor in the development of multiple sclerosis in adulthood. In a Finnish study published in March 2016, mothers with inadequate Vitamin D levels in early pregnancy almost doubled the risk of their children developing multiple sclerosis.
Until now, the fight against smoking has been underestimated in the patients’ population suffering from multiple sclerosis. However, tobacco use clearly aggravates the disease’s prognosis and leads to a more rapid onset of the progressive phase.
The results of basic and clinical multiple sclerosis research over the past ten years are gradually leading to significant changes in its treatment.
