Iron and MS

Via Twitter: The Globe and Mail reports on a researcher's personal obsession that led to an unexpected treatment for multiple sclerosis.

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.

A Cure for MS?

Via a mailing list: Science Daily reports that multiple sclerosis has been reversed in mice.

The new treatment, appropriately named GIFT15, puts MS into remission by suppressing the immune response. This means it might also be effective against other autoimmune disorders like Crohn's disease, lupus and arthritis, the researchers said, and could theoretically also control immune responses in organ transplant patients. Moreover, unlike earlier immune-supppressing therapies which rely on chemical pharamaceuticals, this approach is a personalized form of cellular therapy which utilizes the body's own cells to suppress immunity in a much more targeted way.
GIFT15 was discovered by a team led by Dr. Jacques Galipeau of the JGH Lady Davis Institute and McGill's Faculty of Medicine. The results were published August 9 in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine.
GIFT15 is composed of two proteins, GSM-CSF and interleukin-15, fused together artificially in the lab. Under normal circumstances, the individual proteins usually act to stimulate the immune system, but in their fused form, the equation reverses itself.

A caveat: this appears to be an early-stage treatment that may not reverse existing damage to the nerves.

MS, Gout, and Lactose

Via Mathilda37, a paper from 1998 on the inverse relationship between multiple sclerosis and gout:

A possible association between multiple sclerosis (MS), the disease on which EAE is modeled, and uric acid is supported by the finding that patients with MS have significantly lower levels of serum uric acid than controls. In addition, statistical evaluation of more than 20 million patient records for the incidence of MS and gout (hyperuricemic) revealed that the two diseases are almost mutually exclusive, raising the possibility that hyperuricemia may protect against MS.

Here's her analysis:

No-one with MS has gout, no-one with gout has MS[.]
So what? Well, this is really, really important. It means that something about gout effectively puts the brakes on MS, and the causal factor of gout is high uric acid levels in the blood. It turns out that MS sufferers tend to have very low uric acid levels in their blood, and so can’t get gout.
This explains why some of the MS treating diets have worked in the past. They all seem to require ‘no dairy’ . This works because… consumption of dairy products lowers the risk of gout attacks, so you are looking at a factor that lowers blood uric acid levels. The lactose seems to be the real culprit, as cheese and butter didn’t seem to have any effect on the gout sufferers[.]