Research teams making progress collecting critical data on CCSVI: MS society

TORONTO - Research teams investigating a potential and hotly
debated cause of MS say they are making good progress toward
providing essential data that will help to design a clinical
trial of a proposed treatment for the disease.

The seven Canadian and U.S. teams were given $2.4 million in
July 2010 to probe the connection between multiple sclerosis
and a condition called chronic cerebrospinal venous
insufficiency, or CCSVI, put forth as a possible cause of MS by
Italian vascular surgeon Dr. Paolo Zamboni.

Zamboni has theorized that MS could be caused by narrowed neck
veins, which he suggests cause a backup of blood in the brain,
leading to iron deposits that destroy brain cells and set off
the cascade of nerve damage characteristic of MS.

Multiple sclerosis is an unpredictable, often disabling disease
of the central nervous system, which interrupts the flow of
information within the brain and between the brain and body.
Symptoms range from numbness and tingling to blindness and
paralysis. An estimated 55,000 to 75,000 Canadians have the
disease.

“The research underway is significantly advancing our
understanding of CCSVI and what its relationship might be to
the MS disease process,” Dr. Tim Coetzee, chief research
officer at the U.S. National MS Society, said Friday in a
release.

The research groups have recruited and performed neck-vein
scanning of a broad spectrum of people both with and without MS
to see who may be affected by CCSVI. They are also refining
imaging methods to reliably verify the occurrence of CCSVI and
to understand its role in disease progression, the U.S. society
said.

More than 800 people have been scanned with various imaging
technologies being used in the studies, including the Doppler
ultrasound technique used by Zamboni and his collaborators, and
various types of MRI techniques.

The combined results of the research projects will be used in
the design of an early-phase clinical trial in Canada to test
the ability of balloon venoplasty — which opens up narrowed
neck veins — to improve blood drainage in MS patients found to
have CCSVI. That trial should launch in late spring.

Several of the teams have presented, or are planning to
present, preliminary results at medical meetings. But the
complete results will be available only after completion of all
the studies, which will involve more than 1,300 people
representing a spectrum of forms of MS, as well as individuals
with other neurological diseases and healthy controls.

The U.S. National MS Society, which is jointly funding the
research projects with the MS Society of Canada, said Friday
the next update on the seven studies will be reported in six
months.