Tuesday, February 7, 2017 6:26 PM
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CCSVI in Multiple Sclerosis
For those who wish to understand the recent discovery of tryptophan as a blood biomarker for MS, now being touted as a "breakthrough discovery", here is the paper on the study. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep41473In simple terms, the researchers believe they have found a blood marker for when MS goes from the inflammatory RRMS stage to the progressive SPMS stage. The term to learn is the "kynurenin pathway" (KP) This is how trytophan is broken down to produce lots of neurotoxic metabolites, which cause death of neurons. So, by profiling the metabolites in RRMS and comparing them to SPMS, they found that the KP signatures gave them a clear picture of who had RRMS and who had SPMS, and this showed up in the blood. Important to note that the KP has been implicated in other diseases of neurodegeneration and Ischemic stroke. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1084952115000452https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4972938/"We showed that tryptophan and 3 other metabolites of the KP were important predictors of MS subtype and correlated to disease severity scores. Indeed, the four KP predictors accounted for approximately 90% of the predictive power of our built model with the two inflammatory mediators only adding 10% predictive power. This suggests that tryptophan metabolism is more relevant to MS pathology than general inflammation." What does this mean for those who wish to combat MS and delay progression? "Our results also suggest that strategies aimed rebalancing the KP, particularly in terms of QA/KA levels, could be useful therapeutic approaches in slowing neurodegeneration in MS." This means MS progression is about gray matter loss (neurodegeneration), and not simply inflammatory lesions--and that the KP pathway--activated in ischemic stroke and other neurodegenerative disease--is important. Activation of the kynurenine pathway (KP) of tryptophan metabolism results from chronic inflammation and is known to exacerbate progression of neurodegenerative disease.
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