This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Community: Knowledge & Support

This is my best assessment of what is MS. It is the sketch of a new concept.

The condition to develop MS is prepared by venous insufficiency of the neck veins draining the brains. This breaks the BBB (in certain areas) and slows all sort of processes important in the vessel walls: feeding, transcription.

If you then get a bacteria outbreak like the Cpn (of which it is known that it may be sleeping in your body for years) or a virus (like EBV, also latent), even a vaccination for Hepatitis is suspect, these [or their ligands] will attach to cellular receptors. As these receptors dysfunction, their important role for feeding (cells, charging ion pump) or transcription (activate oligodendrocytes that then should compete to maintain the myeline and axons) gets further impaired. And if severe enough, you get MS (RR).

Some people may 'survive' this first stage of attack, stay reasonably ok and not be diagnosed with MS (but may have noted some symptoms on the way). But they are not there yet. Because at mid age, the gut comes up. Bacteria in the gut (you have many many more bacteria in your gut than cells in your body) manipulate T/B cells (and the immune system). Some people get diabetes or a rheumatic disorder from this. But our problem is a compromised BBB. And these bad T/B cells are misguided and get on the already weakened myeline. And they still get MS. Others who already got MS (RR) in the first stage have a fair chance to migrate to this second progressive phase.

If you then look at the graph of the age of onset, you see the double peak arise that is explained by the different underlying mechanisms.

Of course there are many other aspects on the fringe, to mention some: the mind-body connection (prolactin), the neuro pathways that get excited as part of the regulatory system of the metabolism, the role of zinc to bind and store insulin thereby enhancing insulin sensititity, the role of the liver as gatekeeper (Caucasian women), how things are interlinked with diabetes and diabetes related neuropathy, the attempts at tissue repair (Weiss U. Nature 2008), etc, etc, etc. People may be affected in different ways depending on genetic susceptibilities, environmental factors, the specific pattern of vascular insufficiencies of draining neck veins and so forth.

The challenge is now to subsume all the knowledge and expertise that is around already in a new more advanced model of what is MS and rapidly progress this matter for our cause..

Thanks Leonard. Everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion.

Thanks Scorpions

I think it is more than an opinion...

.. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different laboratory manipulations. The measurements to be performed on a pendulum are not the ones relevant to a case of constrained fall..

... This is not to suggest that pendulums, for example, are the only things a scientist could possibly see when looking at a swinging stone. We have already noted that members of another scientific community could see constrained fall. But it is to suggest that the scientist who looks at a swinging stone can have no experience that is in principle more elementary than seeing a pendulum. The alternative is not some hypothetical "fixed" vision, but vision through another paradigm, one which makes the swinging stone something else...

... it is hard to make nature fit a paradigm. That is why the puzzles of normal science are so challenging and also why measurements undertaken without a paradigm so seldom lead to any conclusions are all. Chemists could not, therefore, simply accept Dalton's theory [of chemical reactions between atoms] on the evidence, for much of that was still negative. Instead, even after accepting the theory, they had still to beat nature into line, a process which, in the event, took almost another generation. When it was done, even the percentage composition of well-known compounds was different. The data themselves had changed. That is the last of the senses in which we may want to say that after revolutions scientists work in a different world.

quoted from the intellectually highly stimulating book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Revolutions as Changes of World View, Thomas S. Kuhn

The book then carries on with The invisibility of Revolutions, "We must still ask how scientific revolutions close. .."

Drawing a parallel with our little world, my own "opinion" (as described in the first posting) is probably as good as the "opinion" of neurologists who have built a huge model around 'auto-immunity' that has never been proven however. My own opinion certainly matches my own experiences as an MS patient, it fits within the factual observations and a vast amount of literature, it fits with the diabetic predisposition seen in my family etc etc etc. 'Auto-immunity' does not.

Let's just hope that it will not take another generation "to beat nature into line".