U.S. researchers said Monday that they may have found a cheap, simple and painless way to track the progression of multiple sclerosis.
They believe that scanning the nerve fibrers of the retina that they were able to detect and measure brain shrinkage which is a marker of the progression of the disease.
"This appears to be a great way of monitoring the disease," said Dr. Peter Calabresi, director of the Johns Hopkins Multiple Sclerosis Center in Baltimore.
Calabresi and other researchers used a technique called optical coherence tomography which is a procedure that bounces light waves off the retinal layers creating high-resolution, cross-sectional images. Researchers tested the technique on 40 MS patients and compared them to 15 healthy patients and then cross referenced their finds against MRI results. A strong correlation was found between the two sets of results. The research team then validated their findings in a study of 200 patients with similar results.
Multiple Sclerosis is thought to be a degenerative auto-immune disease that causes the immune system to erroneously attack the fat and protein myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.
[Source: Yahoo News]
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