Med Center gets $1 mil for MS research

Research on multiple sclerosis at the University got a boost recently when the National Institutes of Health awarded $1.2 million to several Medical Center professors. The four-year grant will allow University researchers to learn more about the progression of the disease using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques. Doctors said they hope this knowledge will eventually lead to more appropriate treatments. Robert Grossman, chief of neuroradiology at the Medical Center and head of the grant, was excited about the opportunity, saying MRI research should enable University scientists to make significant progress that is impossible through customary forms of clinical research. "This is a very interesting disease," Grossman said. "It strikes young people and is . . . a disease of high prevalence. It is important to get a handle on it." Multiple sclerosis is a progressive disease which leaves lesions on the brain and spinal cord of victims. It strikes about one-tenth of a percent of young adults and leaves them gradually debilitated with dizziness, weakness in limbs and abnormal reflexes. MRI machines show a high resolution image of protons of the body which Grossman said allows researchers to see the normal and abnormal changes in the brain or other body parts, Grossman said. Jeffrey Cohen, a professor of neurology and another of the grant researchers, added that the data gathered will allow doctors to see what is going to happen in the future with their patients' lesions and better predict the progress of the disease. "One of the aspects that is most frustrating for patients and doctors is that [the disease] is very unpredictable," Cohen said. "It is very advantageous to be able to predict what someone is going to look like neurologically in the future. Some people get bad quickly and you know you have to treat them aggressively." The advanced technique will show which lesions get better and which ones do not, as well as allowing researchers to determine what changes are due to treatment and which can be attributed to the course of the disease. "Our hope is that using this technology we are going to gain knowledge into what happens to individual plaques," Grossman said. "[MRI] is going to be the arbiter of whether a particular therapy is going to work."

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