A Burden Shared is a Burden Halved

For those of you not familiar with the Carnival of MS Bloggers, please check it out (click on the Carnival button to the right or here). Herrad is the only entry this week. And it's a great one.

Many of us worry about how we may become, or have become, burdens on loved ones. It's why some of us paste smiles to our faces, or never say no to requests, or never ask for help. Forgive me for saying this, but that's a stupid way to live (and I'm as guilty as the next person for not saying no sometimes).

Saying to someone "I'm really not feeling great today, go easy on me" or saying "No, I can't bake cookies for the fair this week" or having your children clean up the kitchen after supper are not bad things at all.

Think how you feel when you've helped somebody. Good, right? Well, give others a chance to feel good, too. Ask for help with the chores, the cookies, or whatever. By allowing yourself to be helped, you are essentially helping someone else.

And there's a difference between making an observation and complaining. In Herrad's case, she says that she does not want to burden everyone with the progression of her MS, but I truly feel she is only making observations of her condition, not burdening her readers. As much as we don't like to face reality sometimes, this is Herrad's reality and the reality for countless others. It must be faced.

It's the reason I speak at every opportunity given to me to raise funds for research and support services. Herrad's reality may some day be mine. And if I don't face that reality, who will?

Leftover Remnants

One of the defining markers of MS is the remnants of "attacks". 11 years after my initial attack, I estimate that I am at about 97%. I still have measurable weakness in my right side and frequent pain in my right side extremities that I can only describe as similar to growing pains. It took only a few months to get back on track physically.Those are the remnants of my first attack.

My second attack, a year and a half after the first, involved the left side of my face. It drooped and chewing was exhausting. But that time it only took a couple of weeks to recover. And I did recover completely, though I do have a remnant from that attack as well; my left nostril occasionally loses feeling (not really a disability; luckily just somewhat annoying to me and interesting to the neuros and my dentist).

We know that the disease modifying drugs lessen the frequency and severity attacks, which in turn means less physical damage to the brain and less disability.

Why we recover in the different ways we do is still a subject of study. Some of us recover quickly from attacks while others don't. Some recover completely, while some are left with what is termed "residual disability" (RD).

I recently read a report on a study that adds support to the use of immunomodulating drugs for patients with MS:

"Findings indicated that RD after 1 year was observed in 54.5% of relapses. As well, higher risk of RD was associated with occurrence of a severe relapse. Incomplete recovery at 1 month was highly predictive of RD at 1 year....

Incomplete recovery at 1 month is a predictor of long-term persistence of RD. Higher relapse severity is also associated with higher risk of RD. Risk of severe relapses is lower in patients treated with immunomodulating drugs."

Every single event that happens in the brain leaves its mark, good or bad, chemically and/or physically altering the landscape of our gray and white matter. We are losing brain volume. Every relapse causes damage. And that damage accumulates, eventually giving us altered abilities. Logic says that reducing the number of relapses is good. Logic says that reducing the severity of relapses is good. The less damage that happens to the brain is good, right?

But what happens if you are medically intolerant of the disease modifying drugs? There are currently studies under way for more than 2 dozen different drugs (besides the DMDs) that show promise. Do some research, ask questions of other MSers who are on different drug regimens, talk to the folks at your nearest MS Society office and ask them to refer you to people willing to share their stories with you. Get information and if you don't understand it, find someone who does. If you're not a "take action" type of person, become one. Pretend it is your young child that needs assistance. You'd move heaven and earth to help your child, so do it for yourself now. You deserve it.

And while you are mulling over all the info and deciding what to do next, you can eat right, sleep well, and exercise.

Most of us have heard our neuro saying that where you are at 5 or 10 years after onset of MS is as good a predictor as any of where we'll be farther in the future. Of course, with MS, prognosis is next to impossible. Information from 10 years ago was predicting that by 19 years after onset, I'd be needing a walking aid of some sort. But since I've been taking one of the disease modifying drugs, I may have altered that prognosis and actually extended the time between onset and need of a walking aid. I'll let you know in 8 years.

S.

Whoops

OK, so I thought I had the video thing figured out but didn't. Will work on getting it to the blog soon....stay tuned.

S.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest...

Kim, at Sunshine and Moonlight posed the question: What happens to lesions when they've disappeared? So I asked the question to Mike, one of the neuro nurses at the MS clinic here in Halifax. The short answer is that they don't disappear, they just stop being active. Because they aren't actively inflamed, they don't show up on the MRI.

Now for the long answer.

Remember, MRI measures water content and water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. First the MRI machine produces magnetic fields (causing all the hydrogen protons to line up in a certain pattern), then a radiofrequency electromagnetic field is applied. Energy from that second field is picked up by the hydrogen protons, and when the second field is stopped the protons release energy at a radiofrequency that can be detected by the machine. The position of the protons is what is measured. And we get pretty pictures of our insides.

When the protons release energy, they do so at a certain rate. Diseased tissue releases energy at a different rate than normal tissue and this is what is detected by the MRI machine and accounts for us being able to "see" lesions.

So, if a lesion is not detected, does it mean that it's not there? Here we get to that whole tree-falling-in-the-forest thing. An active lesion is one that is inflamed. Now we need an explanation of inflammation.

Inflammation involves the destruction of myelin. Just as when we have an injury to our skin, a number of processes occur. Chemicals and cells rush to the scene to detect "bad" cells and try to eliminate them; at the same time, "good" cells are trying to repair any damage. All this activity is what causes inflammation on our skin and it's much the same in our brains. Inflammation is the process of the body identifying the "bad" cells, eliminating them, then attempting to repair the damage. And if a cell dies in this process it is eaten up and eliminated as well.

All of this activity goes on for days, weeks, and even months before we are even aware we have MS or before we exhibit symptoms. Some lesions may have resulted in permanent injury to the axons of some nerves, what they call axonal degeneration. Shrinking of the brain, called brain atrophy, can occur. Remember, dead tissue is eaten up and eliminated by the body, and in the case of our brains, unlike our skin, it is not regenerated. So we end up with "neurodegeneration" and shrinking of our brain. Scar tissue remains, but there is no activity in it. So the MRI machines can't measure it. The lesion may be gone (when looking at an MRI picture), but the results of its previous activity remain.

So the short answer to "Where do the lesions go?" is nowhere. The scarring remains, damage may be permanent, but there's no activity in that spot of the CNS. At least, none that we are capable of measuring at this point in time.

I hope that answers the question. My concern is with people's "fixation" on lesion counts.

So why do we seem to be so fixated on lesion counts? Because right now, that's all we have to grab on to. That's all we have to physically look at and point to to explain symptoms. By the time we exhibit symptoms, the disease process has already been under way for some time and there's little we can do to repair the damage.

Sounds kind of grim, doesn't it? We know this process is going on continuously, so until we can stop MS, we do what we can to slow down the process of axonal degeneration and brain atrophy. Most of us get a course of steroid treatment in the early stages. The steroids quite often stop inflammation in its tracks, which is why we see such marked improvement with steroids alone (sadly, the risks of continued steroid treatment are too great for it to be used often). OK, so we stop inflammation, now what? You are given a choice of one of many disease modifying drugs. These drugs reduce the number of attacks and their frequency so you will go longer without disability. And that's all we can do right now.

Each attack results in inflammation, which can result in permanent damage and atrophy, so logically, we should try to reduce the number and frequency of attacks. While we are doing that by taking a disease modifying drug, we need to be doing other things to aid our bodies in the repair process. Exercise, eating right, getting enough sleep and rest, and reducing our "bad" stress levels are all things that we can do without expensive drug regimes. Exercise your brain, too, learn different things, or attempt them. It's the attempt that exercises your brain.

GPS For Your Brain

And here we go again....another first for Halifax and the Brain Repair Centre. GPS for your brain. Read the article here.

You might think that Halifax is a hotbed of neuro activity with all the posts lately about this stuff. And you'd be right. Because we have folks like Dr. Mendez who come here to live and work and play, we, as a community benefit. So if you've got a neuro type injury, this is the city you want to be in for treatment.

Much of the same can be said for MS treatment. 11 years ago, as I was being diagnosed I was explaining to my folks how lucky I was to be in this city. With the close relationship the medical school had with the hospitals, the excellent faculty of both schools and hospitals, and emerging treatments for MS, Halifax was the best place in the world to be diagnosed and treated for MS. It still is, I believe.

S.

11 Years On

Now that the Christmas season is over, I can take a bit of a breather. It was fun, but so busy I didn't know some days from others.

I may actually put away the decorations this week (though I only took down the Halloween lights December 24th). My neighbour and I will be doing some purging this month as it's easier to get rid of stuff with an uninterested party aiding you. I hope to find a space to set up my bike besides the living room, though it did serve as a Christmas tree of sorts.

I have a slew of appointments to make for this month: eye doc, dentist, family doc...just regular annual or semiannual checkups but I will have my MS anniversary checkup soon, too. Oh, yeah, happy anniversary to me! This week marks 11 years with MS, though in retrospect, I may have had symptoms 5 years before that. I'll be making chocolate cake of some sort this week to share with the staff at the clinic, and like last year there will be pictures. Stay tuned!

And basketball begins this week. Here's a great shot of the owner of the Rainmen taken by the Wookie at one of the exhibition games recently:


We'll be attending the games with our friends Kathy and Jane, which in itself is a hoot. These gals have the same sense of humour we do, poor things.

S.

Let Them Eat Dirt

For almost 11 years I have been wondering what MS is good for, or to put it in other terms, how did MS evolve into what we know it as today?

Who or what organism benefits from a body having MS?

I have spoken about the "hygiene hypothesis" on this blog and the use of worms (called helminths) in possibly treating MS and other auto-immune disorders. Studies are currently under way to see if these creatures are truly beneficial to people with MS. If they are, we need to understand why. Do the worms provoke a type of response that protects from MS symptoms? If so, how?

I came across the "old friends" hypothesis recently and it is related to the hygiene hypothesis. Friendly microorganisms exist all over the world and in our guts. We eat them, drink them, and breathe them in without being aware of it. But we are an obsessed society these days, with improved sanitation and potable water systems, anti-bacterial soaps, and germaphobia, so many of these organisms don't stand a chance of surviving. There appears to be evidence that these "old friends" are needed to build and maintain healthy immune systems. And perhaps the presence of these "old friends" affects our own gene's expressions. If we don't have them, our genes are activated and ta-da! MS appears.

Humans have evolved to the point where we need certain microbes to live in and on us in order for us to maintain our health. If we didn't have the myriad of creatures living with us that we do, the world would be a lot less habitable.

We have been investigating the "viral" theory of MS for years; in other words, we are exposed to a virus that years later provokes an immune response we identify as MS. Maybe we should be looking at what we are missing from our bodies that causes MS. A virus may be the ultimate culprit for MS but what if there's another organism that by its mere existence in our system, battles the virus' long term effect on our immune system and stops the development of MS?

Scientists have identified certain genes that may be involved in MS. How they are activated remains to be seen. But it could be the simple presence of micro-organisms that keep them in line. So now I have to rethink my original question and perhaps look at who doesn't get MS and why not.

The other part of this post comes from an article I came across about a microorganism that when ingested seems to boost serotonin levels.

Researchers first spotted the special effects of the bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, when they used it to help treat patients with lung cancer. They discovered that the bacterium reduced the patient's pain and increased their feelings of well-being.
Lead researcher Dr Chris Lowry explains: 'We thought this might be due to some affect on serotonin in the brain - a chemical that affects happiness. It's a really important chemical and low levels of serotonin can lead to depression in some people.'
We injected the bacteria into mice and found that it had a very similar effect on them as antidepressant drugs such as Prozac', says Chris Lowry. 'The bacteria were triggering an immune response in the body which somehow led to an increase of serotonin in the brain.
'This response was really specific. The bacteria were activating groups of nerve cells that produce serotonin in the areas of the brain that regulate mood and brain function, but no where else. This was what was really striking to us - we didn't expect that,' he explains.
The scientists think their results could help unravel why immune system upsets can lead to depression in some people. But before they can put the bacteria to work treating depression, they need to do some more investigations.
'But before conducting clinical trials on people we need to understand exactly how this works. We believe that the bacteria may trigger sensory nerves in our body that send information back to the brain, causing the increase in serotonin. But at the moment we're really not sure.'
Other experts agree this could be an important step. 'If you take a drug like Prozac, you are setting off all the serotonin neurons, some of which can cause nasty side effects like insomnia,' says Graham Rook, an expert in Immunology at University College London.
'But this response is very specific and activates just the neurons that affect depression. If you could work out the exact molecular mechanisms by which this bacterium works you could find a whole new way of treating depression.'

To sum everything up: eat dirt, it's good for you.

S.