NurseWeek

Early interferon intervention used on MS

By Astara March
September 27, 2000


	You've read the article. Now tell us what you think. Related Sites New England Journal of Medicine National Multiple Sclerosis Society Multiple Sclerosis Education Network

Washington (H24N). Researchers have discovered what they hope is an effective way to slow the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis (MS).

MS is an autoimmune disorder of the central nervous system that usually appears in women 20-40 years of age. It gradually paralyzes them by destroying the protective myelin sheaths around the nerves that allow messages from the brain to get to the muscles.

The first symptoms of MS are mild and usually come and go. Patients may experience difficulty seeing (optic neuritis), muscle weakness (incomplete transverse myelitis), or tingling and numbness in the fingers and toes (brain stem or cerebellar syndrome). Doctors have discovered that the longer the time between these first symptoms and a second episode, the slower the disease progresses and the better the patient's long-term outcome. Now physicians working in 50 medical centers in the United States and Canada have discovered that giving beta interferon as soon as multiple sclerosis is diagnosed significantly prolongs the interval between that first and second set of symptoms.

Beta interferon has been used to treat multiple sclerosis for many years, but only after the disease is well established. The drug slows the progress of physical disability, reduces the number of relapses and reduces the number of brain neurons that lose their myelin sheaths (and show up on magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] scans of the brain). The question was whether the drug would produce the same good effects on early disease. The multicenter study, called CHAMPS, published Sept. 27 in The New England Journal of Medicine proved that it did.

A group of 383 patients who had experienced their first set of multiple sclerosis symptoms and also had less myelin around their brain neurons on MRI scans received either weekly shots of beta interferon or a placebo between April of 1996 and March of 2000. If a second episode of symptoms occurred, patients were withdrawn from the study and placed on appropriate treatment. At the end of three years, the patients who received beta interferon had developed a second set of symptoms only half as often as those who received placebo, with no serious adverse effects from the drug. Repeat MRI scans showed that interferon had arrested the disease almost as soon as it was administered. Further follow-up is necessary to determine the long-term effects of early beta interferon treatment, but the results of the CHAMPS study have given physicians and patients fighting the disease another effective weapon in their arsenal.