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Thursday, September 20, 2007
Now, what's this about Tysabri
I really don't want to post anything negative about Tysabri, I have high hopes for it... and this is info based on a small sample of 21 people. But still... It's a bit unnerving to hear that if you stop taking Tysabri after 2 infusions there is an influx in lesions. Ouch. "MRI scans of patients taken before natalizumab therapy and again more than a year after the last infusion showed a mean three-fold increase in the number of lesions compared with baseline, reported Machteld Vellinga, M.D., of VU University Medical Center here, and colleagues. The rebound effect was most pronounced among patients who had received only two monthly natalizumab infusions. They had a five-fold increase in lesion counts post-therapy, the investigators reported online in Neurology, in a study scheduled for the Dec. 11 print version. "It is intriguing that our observation is mainly driven by the patients who had only been exposed to a small number of natalizumab infusions," the investigators wrote. "Although we have no clear explanation for this, the finding of partial immunosuppression giving rise to extra disease activity was previously observed in rats with experimental allergic encephalomyelitis being treated with low-dose cyclosporine A." "It is intriguing that our observation is mainly driven by the patients who had only been exposed to a small number of natalizumab infusions," the investigators wrote. "Although we have no clear explanation for this, the finding of partial immunosuppression giving rise to extra disease activity was previously observed in rats with experimental allergic encephalomyelitis being treated with low-dose cyclosporine A."
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