There is encouraging news for people who have progressive multiple sclerosis. New research shows an oral drug, used in Japan to treat asthma, may slow the damage progressive MS causes in the brain.
-We all lose some brain volume with aging, but that loss is greatly accelerated in MS patients.
-But now an oral asthma drug, Ibudilast, approved in Japan and used in a relatively small study of 250 MS patients, seems to have slowed that brain loss.
-Half got the drug and half got a placebo.
-“It cut in half the progression of brain atrophy and brought the rate quite close to what we see in otherwise healthy people,” said the study’s author Dr. Robert Fox, of the Cleveland Clinic.
-He used MRI scans to measure brain volume and shrinkage over two years.
-“All the neurological skills that we rely on, you need the brain and the spinal cord tissue to do those,” Krupp said.
-So how does an asthma drug help MS? The theory is that it calms the immune cells that lead to asthma and therefore might calm the immune cells that attack the lining of nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord in MS.
https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2017/10/28/japanese-asthma-drug-may-benefit-multiple-sclerosis/
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