Can Doctors Diagnose MS from Blood?

Article provided by Susan and Jim G. – thank you


Written By Ingrid Wickelgren | Scientific American 

Nowadays, many people with MS find that new medications can mitigate the progression of their disease (see “New Treatments Tackle Multiple Sclerosis,” by James D. Bowen, Scientific American Mind, July/August 2013). But many mysteries remain about the cause of the disorder and no one knows how to prevent or cure it. About a decade ago, a technology entrepreneur named Art Mellor, who was diagnosed with MS in 2000, founded an organization called Accelerated Cure Project based in Waltham, Massachusetts to help speed progress on solving these mysteries, in part through greater collaboration among scientists. In one of its efforts, it maintains a repository of thousands of blood samples from patients who visited any of 10 U.S. clinics. The samples are made available to anyone willing to share their data with the Project. Scientists have used these samples in more than 70 different studies into the causes of MS and how to diagnose and treat it.

A number of these experiments involve trying to identify molecular signs of the disease in the blood, in hopes of developing a simple blood test for the disorder. Such a test might reduce the time and cost of an MS diagnosis. The primary tool for spotting MS today is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which can reveal inflammation in the brain characteristic of the disorder. (Most people believe that multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disorder–a product of an aberrant immune response directed against the body’s own nerves.) But MRI is expensive. It is also not definitive. Sometimes a spot that looks like MS on a brain scan is caused by another condition such as diabetes. Conversely, a normal MRI does not rule out the disorder. Often, too, a doctor has to repeat the scan, and even wait for more symptoms to appear, delaying the diagnosis, sometimes for years.

Doctors also may do a spinal tap, in which they sample the cerebrospinal fluid and examine it for the presence of an immune system protein that should not be there. Electrical tests of nerve function can provide further hints that MS is present. But these tests are not foolproof either and spinal taps are invasive. “For an autoimmune disease, no test is specific or accurate, so you try to build a case for a diagnosis,” says Thomas M. Aune, a molecular biologist at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine


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