Word: myelin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...brain grows fastest at birth and shortly afterward, gaining weight at the rate of about an ounce every two weeks. Reporting similar findings in laboratory animals, the University of London's Dr. John Dobbing said that underfeeding of newborn rats and pigs interferes with the growth of fatty, myelin sheaths around nerve fibers. And this brain damage cannot be fully repaired by normal feeding in later life...
Doctors have long known that at this later stage, the nerve fibers controlling the affected muscles have lost much of their protective sheathing (like insulation on electric wires), a fat-protein combination called myelin. But how to explain the early, on-again-off-again phase of the disease? The question seems particularly urgent because a satisfactory answer might lead into new areas of research and, hopefully, toward control or even prevention...
...been looking for the answer in test tubes containing nerve fibers growing in a nutrient solution. At Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Murray B Bornstein and Dr. Stanley H. Appel found that if serum from MS patients, or from animals with a similar disease, was added to the solution, the myelin "insulation" was dissolved. Serum from healthy people or animals had no such effect. With Columbia University's Dr Stanley M. Crain, Dr. Bornstein then tested the electrical connections between cells within the nerve fiber. Serum from MS patients, the doctors found, inactivates some of these connections, while normal serum...
...doctors report in Science that this electrical inactivation occurs before myelin destruction, is surprisingly rapid and, most important, is readily reversible-at least in the test tube. Washing with healthy serum or simple salt solution restores the normal electrical activity. This, the doctors suggest, may explain the early, unpredictable phase of multiple sclerosis...