"HiCy" Relieves MS Symptoms

Chris Young, a former computer help-desk technician living in Denver, woke up one morning in June 2004 barely able to move the right side of his body. He felt spasms in the muscles between his ribs and a painful squeezing in his torso. When he tried to walk, he had trouble lifting his right foot. "I was scared out of my mind," he recalls. A few days later, an MRI scan confirmed what Young already suspected from looking up his symptoms on the Internet: He had multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease in which the body attacks its own nerve fibers. The day of the diagnosis was his 29th birthday.As his symptoms worsened over the next few years, Young frequently visited Internet forums for MS patients. In October 2007, a forum member described a new clinical trial at Johns Hopkins: Researchers would be testing cyclophosphamide, a chemotherapy drug ordinarily used to treat cancer, on patients with severe MS symptoms. By now Young had tried every known MS drug and nothing had helped. "I was dropping like a rock at that point," Young says. "So I figured, what have I got to lose?" He called the clinical trial's sponsor, Hopkins neurologist Doug Kerr, and was accepted for the study. On March 13, he was wheeled into Johns Hopkins Hospital to begin four days of intense chemotherapy.Read more at...Johns Hopkins Magazine, September 2008.