The Standard Care for Multiple Sclerosis

Hi, Dr. Moat, I'd like to talk about your book, the Standard Care of Multiple Sclerosis. A patient has come to you with a diagnosis. What would be covered in your consultation to the patient on this subject?

So we're not diagnosing multiple sclerosis. We see people already have a diagnosing diagnosis and we want to know what type of Ms. They have, how long they've had it, some things like age. So Ms. Typically comes down in the 20s and people in their 20s. And there's really two major kinds. There's one called relapsing, remitting, that kind of comes and goes. One called progressive, which gets progressively worse. And we see both types. In both cases, these are autoimmune diseases, meaning it's the, your body's antibodies attacking your parts of your brain and the mechanism is called idiopathic means, like the word idio, like idiopathic disease. We don't know the cause of it. We do know it's autoimmune, it's immunomodulated. In this case, you know, we're going to see what kind of drugs they've been put on. If you look at multiple sclerosis, it is actually one of the most expensive diseases to have, second behind heart failure. And this is because the drugs are very expensive and they just don't work really well. So people have sought out alternatives to conventional therapy. Now then, these are not to replace conventional therapy. The things I'm talking about are adjuvant of or their addition to conventional therapy is still conventional therapy is needed. And if we look at the role of stem cells in ms, the stem cells from your body appear to be immunomodulatory, meaning they modulate the immune response. In many cases can put people in some form of remission for about nine months to perhaps a year for pretty much any autoimmune disease. This has been shown in the laboratory and Clin, but for ms, about nine months to a year. So what else can we do in addition to that to maybe get a longer term response? Well, in the book I talk about a few of the things we've discovered with Ms. Or last 10 years or so. I wrote the book in 2018, so using more information since then. But one thing was back in about 2014 or so, they were studying an antibiotic called minocycline. Minocycline is commonly used for acne. It's a antibiotic, one of the few that penetrates into the brain. Interesting. It's one of the few antibiotics that improves the microbiome of the gastrointestinal tract. So most in your gastrointestinal tract or your bowel, you've got multiple bacteria. And most antibodies are like dropping a time bomb in there. And this really messes that up. Where minocycline seems to improve the diversity and richness, which are the two key components to a healthy gut. And we know there's a clear link between the gut bacteria makeup and Ms. Now, we haven't been able to figure out how to exactly fix that, but there's. There was a Link discovered about 10 or 15 years ago that we could take the stool, the feces from a person with Ms. And give it to a mouse and plant it in their gut, and the mouse gets Ms. Okay, so this has been understood. We don't know is what are the bacterial pathogens that seem to be causing that? Well, in Canada, there was a lot of research going on, and one of the things that they kind of stumbled upon was that in the brains that were autopsied, these are people that had passed away. They took the lesions on ms, they have these plaques in their brain. They took them out, and they found DNA of bacteria in the lesions in their brain. The other thing that we see is there's an impaired blood brain barrier. There's a block between the blood and the brain. We have a blood brain barrier to keep stuff from getting into our brain, other things we might want. And the. That barrier is impaired in Ms. Patients. And they also have impaired gastrointestinal or bowel blood barrier. So they've got, you know, leaky gut. So, quote, unquote, leaky gut. We're seeing. Is there certain. Appears to be certain pathogens in the gut that create a leaky gut, allow bacteria to penetrate into the. Into the bloodstream, maybe different bacteria that potentially get into the brain. So that's been a working theory for some years. And they were using minocycline to treat ms, and lo and behold, the drug worked very good. It worked actually similar to these drugs that cost 50, 60,000 a year. They really caught on because it's a generic drug and it's very inexpensive. And the interesting. Interestingly that the research in Canada, which is really the leader of research, they kind of stopped it in 2014 because they got funding to do other stuff. So we just don't know. But this appears to be part of this. Part of the scheme is that perhaps using minocycline to improve the gut lining, the gut barrier may improve. And also there's some penetration into the brain. And minocycline is anti inflammatory. So we're looking at using minocycline for these patients, of course, of about six months. The other thing we notice is that men with Ms. Have low testosterone and women with Ms. Have low testosterone. They respond well to an estrogen called estriola, which is a pregnancy estrogen. So when women have Ms. And they go in pregnancy, they typically get, they go into remission. And it appears to be related to estriol, which is a very weak estrogen, this one that gives your skin the glow. So our current pathway is improving the gut microbiome by using certain, what's called prebiotics, different than probiotics. Prebiotics are certain fibers. We use something called galactool oligosaccharide and we use something called beta thylakoids. So these two prebiotics, minocycline to increase the bacterial plume, estriol in women and testosterone in men and women. In addition to fat derived stem cells or something called svf stromovascular fraction. I don't know that we could say the same for using some other type of stem cell like bone marrow or umbilical stem cells. Most of the studies have been done with fat derived stem cells. And clinically we do see improvement. We have never seen somebody get total reversal of their ms, but we do see people who are progressive sort of slow down their progression and maybe go backwards a little bit. There's a point where the axons in the brain, little connections, the extension cords actually get transected in the Ms. And those are probably not going to grow back. But we could get the disability to stop and maybe reverse a little bit or relapsing, remitting, get those relapses to be less frequent. So none of these are FDA indicated for the treatment of Ms. Mississippi remains a disease that has very little super successful treatment. So these are things you might consider again for adjuvant things to do in addition to conventional therapy if it's not working for you, because this is a very debilitating disease. It's personal to me because my grandmother and my aunt died of Ms. It was interesting they lived in the same house. My grandmother died of Ms. And she passed away. And my aunt didn't get Ms. Until she moved in my grandmother's house and she was in her 50s, which is unusual getting at that age. And there's been questions about the link maybe to, you know, she was in a farming community. There's chemicals used, who knows? I'm not making any conspiracy theories on that. It's observed that this odd pattern in my own family, and it's made me always interested in Ms. And looking for things to potentially slow down this devastating disease or in some cases, stop it or reverse it.