Medicine: Help for Multiple Sclerosis?

Doctors have learned to make no rash claims about treatments for multiple sclerosis. This baffling disease of unknown origin afflicts an estimated 250,000 in the U.S. with varying degrees of incapacity, usually in the legs and arms, often involving speech and vision. Damaging the nerve sheaths in the brain and spinal column, multiple sclerosis may take many forms, from a quickly fatal attack to a 30-year lingering illness punctuated by long periods of relative freedom. Histamine, vitamins and a variety of drugs have aroused high hopes in some researchers and their patients, only to prove disappointing in the long run.

Knowing this, Drs. John Kurtzke and Louis Berlin jumped to no conclusions when a multiple sclerosis patient, treated with isoniazid for bed sores, began to speak so that they could again understand him. Instead, they tested isoniazid, the TB wonder drug, on 30 patients at the Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx. Three received no benefit, but 27 improved, and by a wider margin than previous M.S. patients who had been given other treatments. Most encouraging was the fact that four patients improved when they were given the drug and relapsed when it was stopped, then improved again when it was resumed. Eight of the patients have been followed for a year or more since they left the hospital, and none has had a new attack.