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N-acetylglucosamine relieves inflammation and can promote healing of myelin sheath, says UCI Health neurologist.
UCI Health multiple sclerosis specialist Dr. Michael Demetriou spoke to WebMD about his study of N-acetylglucosamine, a dietary supplement that has been found to ease inflammation and can potentially spur repair of the myelin sheath that encases the nerves.

“What’s different about the other therapies is that they only have myelin repair activity. They can’t treat the chronic active inflammation. I suspect you need both, that you need to first treat the chronic active inflammation and then be able to promote myelin repair.”

https://www.ucihealth.org/news/2024/07/ ... -sclerosis

https://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentra ... 23-02893-9

And I stopped it years ago...

May I ask, is the assumption that N-acetylglucosamine would only be effective in RRSP and only in conjunction with copaxone? Do you plan on resuming N-acetylglucosamine? It's rather an odd "supplement" because does not appear to be found naturally in any amount (shrimp shells I guess..)

Hi CAGirl,

CAGirl wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2024 2:29 pm May I ask, is the assumption that N-acetylglucosamine would only be effective in RRSP and only in conjunction with copaxone? Do you plan on resuming N-acetylglucosamine? It's rather an odd "supplement" because does not appear to be found naturally in any amount (shrimp shells I guess..)

You may be confusing n-acetylglucosamine for the regular glucosamine/chondroitin supplements that some people take because they think it will help with the arthritis in their joints. It's easy to do. Other people on the forum have done the same thing. However, there's an important difference. N-acetylglucosamine has an acetyl group bound to the amine in glucosamine. This changes its function a great deal.

The good thing is that there is a readily available dietary source for n-acetylglucosamine. The chitin found in mushrooms is a polymer of n-acetylglucosamine which is rapidly broken down by the enzyme chitinase freeing dietary available n-acetylglucosamine.

I discuss this in another topic linked below.

viewtopic.php?p=261473#p261473

Also see the preceding post which discusses the difference between n-acetylglucosamine and glucosamine.

viewtopic.php?p=261433#p261433

Like many possible treatments that are cheap and readily available for MS - is it being further researched? No big money to be made.

Hi NHE, the OP said "and I stopped taking it years ago..." at end of the post. That led me to believe he had previously taken N-acetylglucosamine as a supplement. Also any idea why they only included people on copaxone for the trial? (One of the exclusions was no DMT or other DMTs). Do you believe that was to ensure consistency in participants or some other reason ie effect of N-acetylglucosamine would only be effective in conjunction with copaxone? Thanks for the links to possible dietary sources...although still pretty rare!