Have you heard about the recent MS breakthrough which MS patients are talking about and how this discovery is stirring hope for the estimated 2.3 million people, who have been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis around the world?

This amazing discovery has the potential of helping thousands of people around the world, who have been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. This breakthrough could possibly even change the way that the medical community around the world views Multiple Sclerosis on both how it is classified and how it is treated.

On November 21st, an amazing breakthrough for the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) was aired on the news across Canada, that described about a new discovery by Dr. Paolo Zamboni, an Italian vascular surgeon.

Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a vascular surgeon in Ferrara, Italy discovered that most of the MS patients that he was working with had restricted or reduced blood flow to and/or from the brain from venous insufficiency to the blood vessels of the neck and the upper chest regions.  This interesting discovery has peaked the curiosity of the medical community around the world.

Dr. Zamboni was initially prompted to do the research, which lead up to his findings, by the fact that his wife, Elena, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis ten years earlier.  Over the period of time after his wife was diagnosed with MS, Dr. Zamboni saw his wife gradually losing more of her abilities to function on her own and this prompted him to do further evaluations of MS patients, located in Ferrara, Italy to see if any thing could possibly help his wife.

Dr. Zamboni observed initially that the MS patients that he was evaluating had much higher levels of iron in the brain, compared to people without the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis.

Dr. Zamboni began by posing questions about the phenomenon of iron deposits in the brains of patients with Multiple Sclerosis.  He wondered if it was possible that the iron came from blood improperly collecting in the brain.

Examining MS patients with Doppler ultrasound, he found 90% of the patients had narrowing or blockages of the veins that allowed blood flow to and from he brain.  People without Multiple Sclerosis were also tested and they did not have these blockages of the veins in the neck and upper chest regions.

Dr. Zamboni thinks that due to the dysfunction of drainage of the veins, the blood reverses back into the brain, where extra iron is deposited.  He called this vein disorder Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency or CCSVI.

To mend these blockages, Dr. Zamboni developed a surgical procedure to improve blood flow into the brain by opening up veins in the neck and the upper chest.  The procedure involved inserting a catheter into each of the affected veins and inflating a small balloon to open up the pathway of blood flow to the brain to help to increase the blood flow to the brain.

According to the CTV reports, he has performed his surgery, called “la liberation” in Italian, on 120 MS patients.     Because the surgery freed the blood flow, the team dubbed the procedure “The Liberation Treatment.”

Once Dr. Zamboni made his initial discovery, he located a neurologist, who worked with him to conduct a 2 year study on 120 MS patients in Ferrara, Italy to investigate his findings further. The MS patients that were found to have blockages or restricted blood flow to the neck and the upper chest underwent The Liberation surgical procedure.

Out of the 120 patients in the study, 73% of them showed improvements after the surgery was performed, with some remarkable results being seen within the first 6 months after the surgery was performed.

This most recent MS breakthrough shows potential, but will need to be investigated further before more wide spread benefits can be realized through performing more clinic trials and studies.

Investigative clinical trials have begun based on Dr. Zamboni's findings. Dr. Robert Zividinov, of the University of Buffalo, hopes to enroll MS patients, from the United States and Canada, to undergo ultrasound and MRI neck scans to detect blocked veins.

A study of 65 patients afflicted with MS will be published in the “Journal of Vascular Surgery”.    These patients underwent the Liberation Treatment.   Some patients that were interviewed stated that they had no MS attacks since the surgery.

The MS Societies of Canada and the U.S. are cautious in their  support of Dr. Zamboni’s work thus far.   But this new discovery seems to be generating a lot of interest among MS patients.    And some surgeons in the U.S. are now offering Dr. Zamboni’s surgery.  Multiple Sclerosis (MS) afflicts 2.5 million people worldwide.

Dr. Paola Zamboni is a former vascular surgeon and professor at the University of Ferrara in Italy, who was prompted to do his research on MS, since his wife, Elena, had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis ten years before he started his research. This is what prompted Dr. Zamboni to decide to help his wife by learning more about MS. 

But all of this began with a husband's labor of love with trying to help find a way to reduce his wife’s suffering with MS and to help her to find something to help her to recover to some degree from the devastating effects of Multiple Sclerosis on her body.  Elena, Dr. Zamboni’s wife, was one of his first patients to receive the surgery.   After many years of MS attacks,  she now has no signs of a disability. 

To see more of the series of videos about this amazing discovery and to find more resources, contacts and additional links about the MS breakthrough -- these can be found on CTV’s  Website.