High purine diet might be helpful for MS?
Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 8:27 am
I'm new to the website and I'm not sure this topic has been covered in any detail - if it has, please excuse!
This is about the research on serum uric acid levels in MS and the experimental animal MS models, the epidemiology of gout and MS, and (possibly) that a diet that is bad for people with gout might be good for people with MS. I am working off abstracts in PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi, so anything I reference can be found there.
I'm breaking this into two parts.
The story:
Back in the 1970s, a German researcher (Neu, 1977) noted that out of 400 MS patients, none of them also had gout (a disease characterized by high levels of serum uric acid and arthritis). Neu thought this was unusual, because gout was very common in the population the MS patients came from. More recently in the U.S, Hooper et al. (1998) examined over 20 million Health Care Financing Administration records from 1995 in the U.S. and found far fewer MS patients with gout than expected. These studies indicate that some characteristcs of gout, which is a fairly common disease, protects against MS. Gout is also the mirror image of MS in other ways, being more common in men and older women, and less common in younger women.
There have been several articles indicating patients with MS and optic neuritis have lower levels of serum uric acid (Hooper et al., 1998, Knapp et al. 2004, and others); one recent study (Mostert et al. 2005) didn't show a difference in serum uric acid levels between MS patients outside of relapses and controls.
Hooper et al. 1998 and Scott et al., 2002 (same research team) showed that uric acid, and inosine, a precursor that is metabolized to uric acid, either attenuated or blocked development of the experimental "MS-type" disease in mice. Recently, Mattle et al. (2004) gave inosine to 10 patients with progressive MS, 3 of 10 patients improved and there was no sign of progression in the other seven. I don't have the paper, and can't tell the study duration - it appeared to be a pilot trial and the author was not yet ready to recommend inosine.
I have been surprised at how little attention the uric acid angle in MS has apparently gotten from researchers and drug companies, given the supporting epidemiology (more on that in my next post) and the positive data in the mouse model. I started looking in the gout literature for diets that are contra-indicated in gout that (who knows) might be helpful in MS. That is my next post!
LisaBee
This is about the research on serum uric acid levels in MS and the experimental animal MS models, the epidemiology of gout and MS, and (possibly) that a diet that is bad for people with gout might be good for people with MS. I am working off abstracts in PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi, so anything I reference can be found there.
I'm breaking this into two parts.
The story:
Back in the 1970s, a German researcher (Neu, 1977) noted that out of 400 MS patients, none of them also had gout (a disease characterized by high levels of serum uric acid and arthritis). Neu thought this was unusual, because gout was very common in the population the MS patients came from. More recently in the U.S, Hooper et al. (1998) examined over 20 million Health Care Financing Administration records from 1995 in the U.S. and found far fewer MS patients with gout than expected. These studies indicate that some characteristcs of gout, which is a fairly common disease, protects against MS. Gout is also the mirror image of MS in other ways, being more common in men and older women, and less common in younger women.
There have been several articles indicating patients with MS and optic neuritis have lower levels of serum uric acid (Hooper et al., 1998, Knapp et al. 2004, and others); one recent study (Mostert et al. 2005) didn't show a difference in serum uric acid levels between MS patients outside of relapses and controls.
Hooper et al. 1998 and Scott et al., 2002 (same research team) showed that uric acid, and inosine, a precursor that is metabolized to uric acid, either attenuated or blocked development of the experimental "MS-type" disease in mice. Recently, Mattle et al. (2004) gave inosine to 10 patients with progressive MS, 3 of 10 patients improved and there was no sign of progression in the other seven. I don't have the paper, and can't tell the study duration - it appeared to be a pilot trial and the author was not yet ready to recommend inosine.
I have been surprised at how little attention the uric acid angle in MS has apparently gotten from researchers and drug companies, given the supporting epidemiology (more on that in my next post) and the positive data in the mouse model. I started looking in the gout literature for diets that are contra-indicated in gout that (who knows) might be helpful in MS. That is my next post!
LisaBee