Sometimes I Hate The Internet

I hate to get excited, or even hopeful, about news that promises cures for diseases that my friends have. MS is a terrible affliction that affects millions; but in a recent article there apparently is a possible treatment for this disease. This is based on the research by an Italian doctor whose wife was suffering from MS. I really wish this true.

An Italian doctor has been getting dramatic results with a new type of treatment for Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, which affects up to 2.5 million people worldwide. In an initial study, Dr. Paolo Zamboni took 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS, performed a simple operation to unblock restricted bloodflow out of the brain – and two years after the surgery, 73% of the patients had no symptoms. Dr. Zamboni’s thinking could turn the current understanding of MS on its head, and offer many sufferers a complete cure.

Multiple sclerosis, or MS, has long been regarded as a life sentence of debilitating nerve degeneration. More common in females, the disease affects an estimated 2.5 million people around the world, causing physical and mental disabilities that can gradually destroy a patient’s quality of life.

It’s generally accepted that there’s no cure for MS, only treatments that mitigate the symptoms – but a new way of looking at the disease has opened the door to a simple treatment that is causing radical improvements in a small sample of sufferers.

Italian Dr. Paolo Zamboni has put forward the idea that many types of MS are actually caused by a blockage of the pathways that remove excess iron from the brain – and by simply clearing out a couple of major veins to reopen the blood flow, the root cause of the disease can be eliminated.

And here's the reason why I hate to get optimistic about findings promising a simple miracle cure. A 2013 Canadian medical study disproved Zamboni's thesis. Really; with a name like Zamboni ya gotta figure something is screwy.

The study was solid and well-balanced, Dr. Paul Friedemann of the neurology department at Charité University in Berlin and Dr. Mike Wattjes of MS Center Amsterdam said in a journal commentary accompanying the research.

The study "sounds a death knell" for the disease hypothesis of CCSVI, the pair said. It is "now absolutely clear that no reason exists to allocate any further resources to chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency research, be they financial or intellectual."

The Lancet study, which cost about $450,000, was funded by the MS Society of Canada, Saskatoon City Hospital Foundation, Lotte and John Hecht Memorial Foundation, Vancouver Coastal Health Foundation and Woldridge Foundation.

Meanwhile, even though this study has disproved the theory, Traboulsee will continue to conduct a blinded, randomized control trial of the treatment on 100 people in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal and Quebec City.

There Is Hope For Obama

Now medical science can grow a pair for you. This is a wonderful development for soldiers who have sustained grievous, life changing injuries and the GOP.

Doctors in America have created lab-grown testicles that could help soldiers who have sustained serious genital injuries on the battlefield to conceive children.

Hundreds of American soldiers wounded in Iraq alone sustained injuries that made it difficult, or impossible, for them to conceive children.

Now doctors involved in the Pentagon-backed research at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina have used stem cells taken from soldiers to reconstruct intact testicles capable of creating sperm.

Story here:

Scientists Do Science

I am old enough to remember the first polio vaccinations and being anesthetized with ether (tonsils - I still remember being scared to death when they put the gauze cup over my face and told me to count backwards from 100).

The article that follows is truly amazing to me. From Forbes:

Researchers at the Tufts University and University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana successfully delivered an antibiotic treatment to mice with a bacterial infection with what’s considered to be the first resorbable wireless electronic implant.

The wireless implant, made of silk and magnesium, delivered heat to infected tissue in the mice by a remote wireless signal. After the wireless treatment, the device harmlessly dissolved in the mice. This breakthrough research was recently published online the week of November 24-28, 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The implantable medical device market is expected to increase 8% annually to $73.9 billion by 2018 according to a new report by Transparency Market Research.

Have A Heart, Really. Take This One.

The problem: More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won't survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.

The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you're left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.

Then inject that ghost heart, as it's called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor -- a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it -- and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.

More here.