Briefs

Vitamin might affect MS pain

Los Angeles Times

Research in mice suggests a commonly used vitamin called nicotinamide can alleviate the symptoms of the most severe form of multiple sclerosis by protecting nerve fibers from damage. Currently, there is no effective treatment for this phase of the disease, called chronic progressive MS.

The researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston hope to begin trials of the treatment in humans in the near future but cautioned that the doses used in the mice are substantially higher than those typically used in humans.

“We saw no side effects in animals at those doses,” said Dr. Shinjiro Kaneko of Children’s Hospital, “but we definitely need to go through safety tests” in humans.

Advantages of nicotinamide, which is also called vitamin B3, are that it is cheap and that it can readily penetrate the blood-brain barrier to protect nerves in the brain, he said.

MS, which affects as many as 350,000 Americans, is an autoimmune system illness in which the patient’s immune defenses attack the myelin sheath coating nerve fibers, causing the fibers to short circuit. Symptoms include fatigue, difficulty walking, spasticity, and emotional and cognitive changes.

Current treatments, which primarily use various forms of interferon, target the immune system in the earliest stage – the relapsing, remitting phase – of the disease, but have little effect in the later stages.

Kaneko and his colleagues studied mice with an MS-like disease called experimental autoimmune encephalitis, giving them daily injections of nicotinamide.

They reported in the Wednesday’s Journal of Neuroscience that the injections significantly reduced the severity of the animals’ symptoms for at least eight weeks. The greater the dose, the greater the protective effect.

Posted 10-25-06