By NARA SCHOENBERG
CHICAGO TRIBUNE |
MAY 13, 2021
======================
Ivy Marcucci can stand on one leg, with the other raised to the side and bent tightly in a yoga “tree” pose.
She can hike for hours without worrying that she will lose her balance and topple down a mountain.She can ski down steep slopes, and even do a few small jumps.
After a pioneering treatment for multiple sclerosis at Northwestern, Ivy Marcucci, 22, of suburban Riverside, has returned to college in Utah. Her balance has improved to the point that she can hold a one-legged yoga pose.
After a pioneering treatment for multiple sclerosis at Northwestern, Ivy Marcucci, 22, of suburban Riverside, has returned to college in Utah. Her balance has improved to the point that she can hold a one-legged yoga pose. (Leyna Varney)
None of this would have been possible, the college student from Riverside said, without the cutting-edge multiple sclerosis treatment she received at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in summer 2019. Before a hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) for MS, Marcucci, 22, had double vision so bad she needed an eye patch, as well as balance problems and exhaustion, all due to her malfunctioning immune system’s attacks on nerve coatings in her brain and spinal cord.
But two years later, Marcucci is back at school at Brigham Young University, her sight clear, her balance restored.
“I am a new person,” said Marcucci. “I had MS symptoms in high school, so I guess I didn’t fully know what it was like to be a healthy young person. Now, oh my gosh, I feel so good.”
In HSCT for MS, a procedure pioneered in the U.S. by Northwestern University’s Dr. Richard Burt, chief of the division of immunotherapy, the immune system is suppressed with powerful medications before being allowed to reboot, with the hope that it will reset to normal function and stop attacking healthy tissue.
The treatment is called hematopoietic stem cell transplant because stem cells retrieved from the patient’s own body are used to speed recovery, but the immune-suppressing medications are the key element, according to Burt.
Once a controversial alternative to medications that are less risky but also less effective, HSCT for MS got a big boost in 2019, when a team led by Burt published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study of 110 patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, the most common kind of MS, found that 79% of patients who received HSCT showed no evidence of disease activity after five years, compared with just 3% of patients who took standard medications.
“It was so much better than the drug therapy,” Burt told the Tribune in 2019. “It kind of blew it out of the park.”