NEW ORLEANS -- I was going to use this space to describe an upcoming clinical trial of an over-the-counter drug that, a researcher said here, could stave off disability in multiple sclerosis patients, until he told me how much harm such a disclosure could cause.
This researcher -- who I won't name because it could lead MS patients to hound him for immediate details -- said he had developed a high-throughput screen for drugs that could induce remyelination of MS-damaged nerve fibers.
Employed on 1,000 readily available drug compounds, the top hit turned out to be a nationally advertised drug available in supermarkets.
He mentioned it here during a talk at the and also that a clinical trial was set to begin soon. I caught up with him afterward, eager for details that I could put into a story. He expressed concern that putting the drug's name out where MS patients would see it could "contaminate" the trial. (Telling about it to a few hundred neurologists at a conference seemed safe, he said.)
Here's the problem. Even when MS relapses are controlled, the underlying demyelination process continues. Stripped of their protective myelin sheaths, nerve axons become irrevocably damaged, and nerve function irrevocably erodes. The result is increasing disability.
Patients know this. So if they get wind of a readily available drug that may -- just may -- reverse the demyelination process, they will find it hard to resist. That will make it hard, if not impossible, for the researcher and his colleagues to recruit patients into the trial who haven't already tried the drug or wouldn't consider doing so on the sly.
What's more, only preclinical studies support the drug's potential for promoting remyelination. I asked the researcher if they had found any retrospective, epidemiological data to show that patients who had taken the drug had a reduced risk of MS disability, but those data apparently don't exist. The trial represents the first test and maybe the only test of whether the hypothesis has merit.
A further concern is that this particular drug has side effects that could worsen a key clinical manifestation of MS, so if it doesn't succeed as a remyelinating agent, it would most likely be harmful to patients on net. That's another reason why the researcher didn't want word of this drug to get out to the MS community until there is solid evidence for a net benefit.
The researcher said that if the drug works the way he thinks it will, the effects on motor function will be detectable in a matter of months. We shouldn't have to wait very long for the trial results, he promised.
I said I would let him have those months.
Oh, and don't go looking on . With the government shutdown, new trials aren't being added. And, the researcher said, the site's rules allow the drug to go unnamed, so it will remain anonymous when the trial is eventually posted.