Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer ★★★
The Barts-MS team is heavily engaged with the 2020 MS@theLimits meeting at the Royal College of Physicians. Two things to note is the gender bias in favour of female speakers. This was in response to criticism about the male dominance at the last MS@theLimits meeting in 2018.
I am speaking today about some of my ideas around ‘the real MS’ or ‘smouldering MS’. I hope to challenge the current clinico-MRI worldview of MS and to get the MS community to think about MS as a biological disease.
I am hoping to make a compelling case for tackling smouldering MS with combination therapies and will be giving several examples in the presentation. Please note my talk includes Brain Health that will become increasingly important in the future.
CoI: multiple
The nightmare which is MS continues. I took the risk with Lemtrada and have followed the Brain Health guidance to the letter, but there are so many processes in play that MS always wins in the end. Your scenarios are depressing to say the least. You’d think in 2020 that there would be some examples of MSers where the disease had been stabilised or some minor recovery of function had been achieved!
My aunt died a grim death from MS at 52. When I was diagnosed I told my husband that I’d have swapped it for a cancer diagnosis. There isn’t any mention of ebv in your presentation, but the notion that it’s an inside out diseas3 is the worst case scenario.
You and your colleagues can look forward to MS at the limits 2030. We are at least a decade away from treating the real MS.
How old are you Glen and how are you doing?
Your aunt did not get the chance for a good treatment, but you did, there have been some improvements in the general picture of MS
The sad thing was the debate “Is it unethical to do comparitor studies in paediatric MS” and the debate was lost big time. So your neurologists are happy to put your children and you on dodo drugs that will fry your brain. This done for the sake of a nice easy, no brainer study run by pharma that are essentially doing a marketing trial to show you their drug is better thanthe Dodo drug that should have been put in the bin long ago. They pacify themselves that people are put on beta iterferon rather than nothing, yet we all know if the comparitor drug cannot do better than beta interferon, it is crap.
The neurologist get lost in the semanitcs of the question that allows them to sit on the fence, but I am sorry there is a more of a fundemental issue. Using this logic it allows neurologists to be happy to do monotherapy trials because they are easy and what the pharma industry like, when anyone with an ounce of brain knows there is inflammation throughout the course of MS and you can deal with that, so why not do it, but we don’t. MS-SMART, MS-STAT, MS-STAT2 and MS-SMART2? will it be smart?
This doesn’t relate to what Prof G is talking about above, i.e. smouldering MS? Why not do a separate post?
What causes MS….that’s the question (EBV) and how does it do it…no idea how…shame he doesn’t read our papers…….:-).
MS is an inside-out disease, slide 56. Which moves further away from anti-inflammatories as being the answer?
Of the neuroprotective studies ongoing, which look to be appropriate for combo therapy along with current DMTs? The gold particle study targeting metabolism? Clemastine? Bazedoxifene? What about inhibiting C3 activity, or TNFR1 activity?
Especially for women with the disease, testing SERMs or estriol should be investigated as a neuroprotectant once they approach menopause.