First oral MS drug helps mom get back to a more normal life
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Denise Malchano was once in a wheelchair with her multiple sclerosis, but since taking a new drug, Gilenya, she can now play with her son, Brandon, on their backyard trampoline. -
Denise Malchano.
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Denise Malchano was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks the central nervous system, on Jan. 16, 1996.
"I lost my whole left side," recalled Ms. Malchano, 40, of Pine, a social worker and mother of a 10-year-old boy. "My face drooped; I lost my gag reflex. I lost everything on that left side."
At the time, she was able to get around with the help of a cane, but she has spent time in a wheelchair, too.
In MS, which affects some 400,000 Americans, certain white blood cells damage the protective insulation around the nerves of the central nervous system and may also damage the nerves themselves. As a result, message-carrying nerve impulses from the brain and spinal cord may short-circuit, causing reduced or lost bodily function.
Ms. Malchano has relapsing-remitting MS, the most common form of the disorder, affecting some 80 percent of all patients. In that kind of MS, patients experience symptoms for a period of time and then go into remission or a lessening of symptoms for another period of time before the cycle starts all over. She averaged one relapse per year, usually on the left side.
In primary-progressive MS, which affects most of the other 20 percent of patients, there is a more steady progression of the disease. There are also some other less common types of MS.
MS typically strikes people between the ages of 20 and 50 and affects women at least twice as often as men depending on the type.
"There are many factors in why people get MS," said neurologist Rock Heyman, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at UPMC. They include genetics and environmental factors. For example, Dr. Heyman said, "cloudy parts of the world have more MS." And, said neurologist Thomas Scott, director of the Allegheny Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Center, the disease "is more common in the North than the South."
First Published July 18, 2011 12:00 am
