Time Since
Transplant:

UPDATED 23 December 2022

Two conflicting studies about HSCT and progressive MS have surfaced in the last two months. The first was an apropos article from Tomas Kalincik, PhD, of the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia in a late-breaking presentation at the 2022 meeting of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS). The second was by Matilde Inglese, MD, PhD, study author and professor of neurology at the University of Genoa, in Italy, which was published in Neurology on December 21, 2022.

Dr. Kalinck's Study

The presentation was regarding AHSCT and Progressive MS. Kalinick's findings have long since been suspected, yet there are definitely some high-profile cases that contradict this new research. My mentor, George Goss, mentioned throughout this blog, is one of them. Without George's detailed documentation of his experience, I might not have undergone my such treatment. (My own diagnosis at the time of my procedure was Relapsing MS.)

I've been getting nudged to update this blog. I realize that I've been silent to an almost negligent degree. So sorry about that. I've been trying to move on from being "the guy who did the bone marrow transplant" to just being more of just some "guy."

Eight years ago, I saw myself as "the guy whose whole life changed due to a sudden medical problem." I bumped around for almost two years, constantly worsening until I was finally diagnosed with MS. Before the diagnosis, I surely thought I was going to die soon. When I was diagnosed, I had no idea what MS was, but at least I had new hope because now doctors could treat me, and hell, I had modern medicine to cure me. That new hope didn't last too long. Now I was being bounced around from drug to drug with little improvement. I thought now I was going to be kept alive longer while I continued to suffer.

Then I found HSCT as a real, potential solution. I had new hope. My title changed to "the guy who was going to go overseas to get a non-FDA-approved, experimental stem cell transplant." I held that title for only three months until, for a month, I became "the guy who's in Mexico getting a non-FDA-approved stem cell transplant." People made up their own reasons why the FDA hadn't approved this procedure. The most common misinformation I heard was that it was a moral issue due to the killing of a fetus or something like that. In the meantime, I suffered. I had to explain that my transplant was autologous and was still experimental in the US because of the mortality risk.

Updated March 31, 2018.

MS stands for Multiple Sclerosis, which basically means "many scars." The scars develop in the central nervous system (CNS), composed of the brain and spinal cord, as the result of an attack from the body's own immune system.

In a normal body, an attack of the CNS would still be a pretty awful thing, but the body would fight the attacking agents, clear away the resulting plaque, then begin to repair the damage. Sclerosis is a type of scar tissue that is atypical of a cleanly healed injury.

In people with MS, the immune system is stuck in fighting mode, commonly thought to be the result of high levels of inflammation in the body. This keeps the CNS stuck in defense mode, preventing normal healing of the damage. The attack is not the result of a typical virus or bacterial infection, it's actually the body's own immune system doing the damage. This process is referred to as "autoimmune" (immune system attacking the self). Dr. Stephen Gundry refers to this process as "friendly fire." There are a hundred or more different autoimmune diseases. Some of the most common ones are Graves' Disease, Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, Lupus, Type 1 Diabetes, Chron's Disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis and Multiple Sclerosis (MS).