A recent report in Science Traslational Medicine (1) has deserved a lot of attention by mainstream media. Headlines referred to it as the confirmation that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease. Narcolepsy is an interesting disease both clinically (sleep attacks, cataplexy, sleep paralysis, visual hallucinations during early sleep and awakening…) and pathophysiologically. Current knowledge points at […]
This week we had the opportunity to read a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, describing, in my opinion, a breakthrough finding in MS. It’s published by Srivastava and coworkers, from the University of Munich. It describes the presence of antibodies against the KIR4.1 potassium channel in almost 50% of MS patients. Maybe […]
It’s been a while since i wrote last post, but NeuroImmunology has been busy with several other projects. It’s been a while too since i decided to write a monographic post about the different oral treatments that are already available or are about to arrive but i postponed it until i had enough time to […]
MS scientific literature is fascinating. Few neurological (and non-neurological) diseases can compete in number of papers, impact factor and mainstream media attention. However many research projects use classical animal models (experimental allergic encephalmyelitis, EAE) and those animal models have been an enormous source of erroneous extrapolations to MS pathogenesis. Many times the EAE model has […]
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Fingolimod unexpected death
A few days ago we had access to this alert in Medscape. An MS patient, that had completed the 6-hour vigilance period after the first dose of fingolimod, died unexpectedly the next day. We don’t know much about it and we should wait until this case is resolved and an official report released. We only […]
Two weeks ago the annual meeting of the ECTRIMS was held in Amsterdam. As usual, several interesting presentations, some of them probably good enough to change the immediate future of MS clinical practice, were presented. Among them, new data regarding the next 3 new oral therapies that probably will be approved when their results are […]
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Interferons, get out!
Today New England Journal of Medicine makes public the results of a large clinical trial with more than a thousand patients comparing results of teriflunomide against placebo in MS. Results are not spectacular, but not bad. It decreased a 30% the annualized relapse rate and reduced the rate of disability progression slightly. The best point […]
Last June NeuroImmunology attended the 2011 Biennial meeting of the Peripheral Nerve Society in the Bolger Center, Potomac (MD). We were obviously interested in disimmune disorders but, we must recognize that, probably, breakthrough, surprising and interesting works were outside our field. Genetic and acquired neuropathies sessions showed, in our oppinion, a higher level than disimmune […]
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Extraordinary claims…
… require extraordinary evidence. That is the heading of a “Message from the Editor” in Annals of Neurology published online in April 2011. It comments on a paper demonstrating the absence of retroviral particles in CSF of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome while criticizes the role of publishers (and researchers) paying (too much) attention to […]
Chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency is a novel hypothesis, proposed for the first time by Dr Paolo Zamboni, to try to explain the elusive cause of multiple sclerosis (MS). Briefly, this hypothesis proposes that the autoimmune attack against oligodendrocytes and the demyelination process, hallmarks of MS pathology, are caused by an excessive deposition of iron around […]