And kinda scary...

J Neurol Sci. 2006 Nov 22; [Epub ahead of print]

Interferon beta-1b exacerbates multiple sclerosis with severe optic nerve and spinal cord demyelination.

Warabi Y, Matsumoto Y, Hayashi H.
Department of Neurology, Tokyo Metropolitan Neurological Hospital, Tokyo, Japan; Department of Molecular Neuropathology, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience, Tokyo, Japan.

To evaluate the effect of interferon beta-1b (IFNB-1b) on multiple sclerosis (MS) with severe optic nerve and spinal cord demyelination, we examined the relationship between IFNB-1b treatment outcome and the clinical and genetic characteristics of three types of demyelinating diseases of the central nervous system, i.e., neuromyelitis optica (NMO), MS and MS with severe optic-spinal demyelination.

Japanese MS frequently carried HLA DPB1()0501, which is associated with NMO. MS with DPB1()0501 showed severe optic-spinal demyelination represented by longitudinally extensive spinal cord lesion, blindness and CSF pleocytosis.

IFNB-1b treatment did not succeed in these patients because of the increase of optic nerve and spinal cord relapse and other severe side effects. IFNB-1b should not be administered to demyelinating patients with genetic and clinical characteristics mimicking NMO such as HLA DPB1()0501 allele, longitudinally extensive spinal cord lesion, blindness and CSF pleocytosis even if they have symptomatic cerebral lesions as typically seen in MS.
The present study strongly suggests that these patients should be diagnosed as having NMO.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...=pubmed_DocSum

That's Betaseran isn't it...Sheesh.

Well, the Japanese have said that they have a different type MS than we have here, and it has a lot to do with ON. Maybe this won't effect anyone other than the Japanese MSers??

If Beta 1b was causing that problem here, we would certainly know about it, wouldn't we?

I don't know if we'd know. If anyone seems to be getting worse on it, they just said it's a treatment 'failure'. And I don't know if they ever broke the stats down in the trials to determine exactly how many people got better, how many people were stable and how many people worsened (beyond the placebo group). I would think if a portion of the participants in the trial suddenly began to get a lot worse, beyond what the worsening group of placebo patients did, that might have raised a red flag.

But then again, maybe that's why they only generalize the stats, so we don't know the answers to questions like this, if anyone actually got WORSE because of the drug, over and above what the worsenings in the placebo group were.

I sure hope we don't have a lot of people getting sicker here BECAUSE of the drug. On the opposite end though, if that were the case, then the drug is probably even more effective in the rest of the group, seeing as how their stats would be dragged down by those getting worse from the drug.