http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily...6/02health.htm

A possible advance in fight against multiple sclerosis
By LEE BOWMAN , Scripps Howard News Service

Researchers working with mice report that it may be possible to protect people with multiple sclerosis from long-term nerve damage by boosting levels of a vitamin derivative in the nervous system.
MS is a neurological disorder in which nerve fibers are damaged by inflammation thought to be triggered by the immune system's mistakenly attacking them.
Damage to nerve fibers and to their fatty insulating tissues, disrupts nerves' ability to conduct electrical impulses to and from the brain. This produces the symptoms of MS that include fatigue, difficulty in walking, pain, spasticity and emotional and cognitive changes.
Currently, MS treatments mainly protect against inflammation and loss of fatty insulating tissues, but don't completely prevent long-term scarring and breaking of the nerve fibers, for which there is no good treatment. And some of the drugs given to treat the early phases of the disease have severe side effects.
Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston, the pediatric teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, worked with mice that had an MS-like disease.
The experiments, described Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that nicotinamide— a form of vitamin B3, or niacin — not only protected the animals' nerve fibers from degeneration and fatty insulating tissues loss, it also protected nerve fibers that have already lost insulation from degrading further.
"We hope our work will initiate a clinical trial, and that nicotinamide could be used in real patients," said Dr. Shinjiro Kaneko, a research fellow at Children's who led the study. "In the early phase of MS, anti-inflammatory drugs may work, but long-term, you need to protect against axonal (nerve fiber) damage."
On a scale of 1 to 5 (with 1 being only mild weakness in the tail; 4, paralysis in all four limbs, and 5, death from the disease), mice receiving the highest doses of daily nicotinamide injections under the skin had scores of 1 or 2, while mice not getting the vitamin had scores of 3 or 4.
Nicotinamide significantly reduced neurological symptoms even when treatment was delayed for 10 days after the onset of disease in the mice, raising hopes that it can be effective in the later stages of MS in people.
"The earlier therapy was started, the better the effect, but we hope nicotinamide can help patients who are already in the chronic stage," said Kaneko.
Kaneko noted that since vitamin B3 is already used medically to treat high cholesterol and other disorders, it should have few side effects in humans being treated for MS. But he noted that the doses used in the mice would translate to much higher doses than typically given to people, so new tests for safety would be needed before there could be any tests to evaluate the drug's effectiveness.

Date of Publication: September 19, 2006 on Page