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Study: MS Cases on the Rise Among Children |
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Written by Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY
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Saturday, 21 September 2002 |
Experts in the treatment of multiple sclerosis say more children are
being diagnosed with MS, an autoimmune disease thought to strike mostly
adult women.
Researchers in New York have identified and studied 21 children with MS
in one of the first studies to examine how the disease affects younger
patients. The picture emerging from this first-of-a-kind study suggests
that children as young as 6 can get this disease of the central nervous
system.
Lauren Krupp, a neurologist at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook, and her colleagues have studied 21 children from all over
the USA with MS — kids who probably wouldn't have gotten a diagnosis in
the past because doctors can overlook the disease when treating
children.
MS often follows an unpredictable course in which symptoms, such as
tremors, loss of balance and slurred speech, come and go. But in some
cases, people suffer from a more serious form of the disease in which
the symptoms steadily get worse. In rare cases, MS can cause death.
Roughly 350,000 Americans have MS, and experts estimate that as many as 20,000 children have the disease but are undiagnosed.
Misdiagnosing children with MS didn't matter much 10 years ago, when
there was no treatment for the disease. Today, an early diagnosis
matters a great deal: Neurologists have a number of powerful new drugs
at their disposal that can slow the potentially disabling disease,
Krupp says.
But those drugs have been tested in adults with MS, not in children. So
the New York team found itself in uncharted territory when it came to
treating the 21 children in the study. They found that drugs used to
treat adults usually worked well in kids, at least in this preliminary
study.
But they had to employ a variety of drug strategies in four of the
children who suffered from a particularly aggressive form of the
disease.
Instead of the one or two relapses that adults can have in the first
few years after diagnosis, the children got hit with four, five or even
seven flare-ups of the disease. In such cases, the team had to try
combinations of drugs used to treat MS. The team hopes such drug
combinations will delay disease progression in such aggressive cases.
Krupp presented her findings last week at the Americas and European
Committees for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis held in
Baltimore.
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