"A new clinical trial, which is seeking participants, may help women with MS get rid of the needles"
A new clinical trial, which is seeking participants, may help women with MS get rid of the needles.
Researchers hope an estrogen called estriol will help women with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.
It marks the first large-scale trial of a sex hormone to treat the disease, according to the National MS Society.
"Pregnancy makes a variety of autoimmune diseases get better," said Dr. Rhonda Voskuhl, who is heading the study at UCLA.
One of the diseases it helps is multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks the central nervous system. In MS, the myelin sheath around nerves which helps conduct electrical impulse is lost in multiple areas and replaced with scar tissue.
Voskuhl and a team at UCLA, as well as six other universities around the country, will start enrollment at the end of February for a two-year clinical trial of estriol with about 130 nonpregnant women with MS.
About four years ago, Voskuhl did a small-scale study of estriol with 12 women who had MS.
"We saw an improvement in cognitive functions," she said.
The study also saw an 80 percent reduction in inflamed regions in the brain.
Voskuhl hopes the new estriol study will yield positive results of protecting the nerves and reducing lapses, and not just act to help inflammations.
Estriol is taken in pill form, which would ultimately be cheaper than current treatments. Voskuhl said injection treatments can cost a patient anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000 each year.
Throughout the study, women will take a daily shot of the anti-inflammatory drug Copaxone as well as an estriol pill or a placebo.
"Nobody gets less than the standard of care," Voskuhl said.
The significance of gender differences in diseases such as MS, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, which affect women three times more frequently than men and often improve during late pregnancy, was long-known but mostly overlooked.
Voskuhl, a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and former senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, suspected that the sex and pregnancy clues "must be a hint into how these diseases work."
She zeroed in on two hormones produced in abundance during late pregnancy, progesterone and estriol. Mice developed as models for human autoimmune conditions were exposed to the hormones at blood levels close to what would be circulating during the third trimester.
"Progesterone didn't do much," she reports. "But there was a huge disease amelioration when we gave them estriol."
The hormone seems to rein in peripheral blood cells that produce inflammatory reactions. So convincing were her results that the Food and Drug Administration gave her a green light for a six-month pilot study of estriol in women with MS
Enrollment for the study is slated to begin in late February at.......[GO TO MY BLOG FOR FULL STORY AND LINKS]
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