I blogged earlier about an Italian med school professor named Paulo Zamboni who, studying his wife, came up with an entirely new theory about multiple sclerosis (MS): It’s caused by restricted blood outflow from the brain. Almost all MS patients had this condition, Zamboni found. The great value of this theory is that blood outflow can often be improved with surgery. In at least some cases, this surgery has reduced MS symptoms.
Now, a study done in Buffalo has found results that support Zamboni’s idea. MS patients were twice as likely as healthy people to have restricted blood flow. This is a weaker correlation than Zamboni found but I make nothing of it — there are lots of ways to mess things up, so that you get noisier results. (And there are lots of ways to push results in a preferred direction.)
Zamboni wasn’t an MS expert. He made this breakthrough because his wife had MS and he had technical skills (including surgical skills — his specialty is surgery).
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
ms patients have a high level of inflammation, so this would be expected, i.e., inflammation causes vein constriction or at least exacerbates it.
only double the incidence? if it were the cause, wouldn’t you expect 100% incidence?
q, no you wouldn’t because the dividing line used by researchers to classify is unlikely to be the same as the dividing line used by nature and life and diagnosticians to divide people into affected and non-affected.
peter, it isn’t the diameter of the blood vessels that’s weird, it’s their configuration.
Imagine if ten years from now MS is routinely cured by simple vein surgery. And people could be screened for being at risk of the disease and have it prevented as well. This would be a true medical miracle. Somehow I think it is too much to hope for, but there is a chance it could happen.
Just reading a little bit about MS. This is a disease of the myelin sheaths that surround and insulate nerve fibers. It is thought to be a form of autoimmune disease, and in particular results when a particular type of lymphocytes (white blood cells) called T cells escape into the brain and cause harm. Normally T cells are not supposed to be able to get into the brain due to the blood brain barrier. The endothelial cells that line blood vessels in the brain are supposed to be glued very tightly together, preventing anything escaping. In the rest of the body these connections are intentionally rather loose, but the brain environment is very controlled and nothing is supposed to get through. The brain has its own immune cells, separate from the lymphocytes. So having T cells in the brain is a prescription for havoc and this is thought to be one of the primary causes of MS. Somehow the BBB breaks down in MS and lets the T cells through.
Given all this, maybe it is not so surprising that blood flow problems might contribute to at least some cases of MS. You could imagine that failure to drain blood freely could cause some backups and increase pressure on the BBB, potentially causing failures and leading to the whole chain of damage in MS. Freeing blood flow as a curative factor is not then as outlandish as it may seem.
I was diagnosed last year with ALS, a different neurological disease but also pretty bad. Interestingly there are some hints that ALS could also be related to blood brain barrier problems. Traces of hemoglobin have been found in ALS spinal cord tissue, another substance which should not be allowed to escape. Hemoglobin is iron rich and iron can be harmful in tissues where it is not designed to be present. A few therapies have been tried which are supposed to improve BBB integrity but so far nothing dramatic has resulted.