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Wednesday, September 20, 2006
A possible advance in fight against MS by Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston, the pediatric teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School...CLICK FOR FULL ARTICLE:
"...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. " |