Combination Therapy In Ms

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic and often disabling disease of the nervous system, affecting about 1 million people worldwide. Even though it has been known for over a hundred years, no cause or cure has yet been discovered-but now there is hope. New therapies have been shown to slow the disease progress in some patients, and the pace of discoveries about the cellular machinery of the brain and spinal cord has accelerated. This book presents a comprehensive overview of multiple sclerosis today, as researchers seek to understand its processes, develop therapies that will slow or halt the disease and perhaps repair damage, offer relief for specific symptoms, and improve the abilities of MS patients to function in their daily lives. The panel reviews existing knowledge and identifies key research questions, focusing on: Research strategies that have the greatest potential to understand the biological mechanisms of recovery and to translate findings into specific strategies for therapy. How people adapt to MS and the research needed to improve the lives of people with MS. Management of disease symptoms (cognitive impairment, depression, spasticity, vision problems, and others). The committee also discusses ways to build and financially support the MS research enterprise, including a look at challenges inherent in designing clinical trials. This book will be important to MS researchers, research funders, health care advocates for MS research and treatment, and interested patients and their families.

Written by experts in the dermatology field, this new fourth edition of Moderate-to-Severe Psoriasis discusses the current use of biologics and other pharmacologic and phototherapy treatments for moderate-to-severe psoriasis. Illustrated with high quality color figures, this standalone text emphasizes safe and effective treatments for the psoriasis patient that are perfect for the dermatologist in daily practice. New to this edition are chapters on day treatment programs, new agents, erythrodermic and pustular psoriasis, special populations, and pharmacogenetics.

This revised textbook examines the most important aspects of multiple sclerosis that impact on clinical trial design, on the development of new disease therapies, and, most importantly, on patient care. An international team of contributors discusses the clinical course of multiple sclerosis, its clinical heterogeneity, and the presence of subclinical disease activity which occurs during the early stages of the disease. There have been substantial advances in the field since the first edition was published in 1999. There are new chapters on functional imaging, the issues involved in long-term follow-up studies, cyclophosphamide, sex hormones and pregnancy-related factors, complementary and alternative treatments, management of cognitive impairment, treatment of pain, and rehabilitative approaches. Chapters on MS pathogenesis, imaging, the interferons, glatiramer acetate, mitoxantrone, IVIg, plasma exchange, stem cell transplantation, combination therapies, and newly-emerging treatments have been updated. This book is essential for any clinician who works with MS patients.

A synthesis of current concepts about the evaluation, treatment, and future directions in MS. On the evaluation side, the authors review the use of MRI, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, functional MRI, and three-dimensional MRI, and consider the rapidly developing body of pathologic information they have yielded. On the treatment side, the focus is on recently approved medications (Novantrone), new indications for medications (CHAMPS Trial), medications in development (Oral Interferon Tau, Oral Copaxone, and Oral Cellcept), immunosuppressive therapy for both progressive disease and symptomatic therapy; the current medications for treating relapsing-remitting MS (Avonex, Betaseron, and Copaxone) are also discussed. For future directions, the authors present the current best thinking, as well as the latest discoveries in immunology relating to MS, including groundbreaking B-cell research and its applications to specific immunotherapies, and the use of immune markers for tracking the disease.

This textbook examines the most important aspects of multiple sclerosis that impact on clinical trial design, on the development of new disease therapies and on patient care. The international team of contributors discuss the clinical course of multiple sclerosis, its clinical heterogeneity, the presence of subclinical disease activity which occurs during the early stages of the disease. Multiple sclerosis presents clinical challenges: from unexpected and irregular relapses to profressive deterioration.

This book is the first to tackle, in a single treatise, a subject that has recently become a discipline in its own right, that of the combination antiretroviral therapy of AIDS. It is aimed at an audience of clinicians, researchers, public health workers, specialists or non-specialists in AIDS and particularly those who want to know how to optimally approach the treatment of AIDS. Combination drug treatment of AIDS is focussed from different angles and perspectives, historical, basic, economic, theoretical, virological, immunological, clinical and practical reasons for therapy failures are examined and strategies to prevent or overcome failing therapies are formulated. This book fills a gap in the current literature on clinical therapeutics. It should be particularly informative to those who want and need to know more about the current treatment of AIDS, with its successes and failures, but also with lessons and guidelines to affront these failures.