A Clue in Multiple Sclerosis

In the past dozen years, doctors have tried no fewer than 50 promising drugs and other treatments for multiple sclerosis. In no case has the promise been fulfilled. "MS" remains an inexorable and eventually fatal disease, especially baffling because in its early stages victims may have sudden and severe attacks of partial paralysis or blindness, then make what seems to be a good recovery. The respite, however, is distressingly brief, and when the disease is farther advanced, the disabilities become permanent.

Doctors have long known that at this later stage, the nerve fibers controlling the affected muscles have lost much of their protective sheathing (like insulation on electric wires), a fat-protein combination called myelin. But how to explain the early, on-again-off-again phase of the disease? The question seems particularly urgent because a satisfactory answer might lead into new areas of research and, hopefully, toward control or even prevention of MS.

A group of New York City researchers have been looking for the answer in test tubes containing nerve fibers growing in a nutrient solution. At Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Murray B Bornstein and Dr. Stanley H. Appel found that if serum from MS patients, or from animals with a similar disease, was added to the solution, the myelin "insulation" was dissolved. Serum from healthy people or animals had no such effect. With Columbia University's Dr Stanley M. Crain, Dr. Bornstein then tested the electrical connections between cells within the nerve fiber. Serum from MS patients, the doctors found, inactivates some of these connections, while normal serum does not.

The doctors report in Science that this electrical inactivation occurs before myelin destruction, is surprisingly rapid and, most important, is readily reversible--at least in the test tube. Washing with healthy serum or simple salt solution restores the normal electrical activity. This, the doctors suggest, may explain the early, unpredictable phase of multiple sclerosis.

If so, the disease results from something circulating in the blood that attacks nerve-cell junctions. That something is most likely a form of antibody --which would mean that MS could be classed among the growing number of diseases now recognized to be the result f "autoimmunity," a condition in which the body becomes allergic to part of itself (TIME, May 1, 1964). Such classification suggests no immediate new treatment for the disease, but it is a fresh sign of hope and a sure indication of an area for intensified research.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.