Recently, approval was granted for distribution of oral MS drug treatments. It is projected these effective alternatives will make it easier for MS patients to start and stay on an MS drug therapy regimen. The first on the market to be approved is called fingolimod (Gilenya).

Fingolimod has shown great promise in reducing flare-ups of multiple sclerosis symptoms in clinical trials. It has been tested against using the common injectable MS drug treatments and placebos. The effectiveness of fingolimod is accomplished by the drug preventing the movement of T cells out of the lymph nodes. Without getting into a lot of clinical details, this means that they are not released into the body so to attack the myelin sheaths that protect the nerve fibers. As most are aware, the protective covering on the nerve fibers is made up of a fatty compound of lipids and proteins that also helps …

Traditional MS drug therapies used up through and until the mid 1990’s were all immunosuppressives.  Since MS is an autoimmune condition, this approach made sense.  These MS drug treatments included steroids and chemotherapy, which usually caused damage to the patient’s body even though they did slow the progression of this hideous disease.  Diagnosis of MS usually happens somewhere between the age of 20 and 40, so slowing down progression can significantly improve the quality of life.  And since the lifespan is usually not significantly decreased, the quality of life is of utmost importance at this stage of our progress in treating MS patients.

MS drug treatments – a new approach

In the mid-nineties, the so-called “ABC Drugs” started to be used with increasing frequency in MS drug treatments regimens.  These drugs – Avonex, Betaseron, and Copaxone are in the category of immunomodulators.  While the traditional immunosuppressives would treat the …