My Tysabri Diary...

I was not going to address on my blog the negative "melanoma/Tysabri" articles that have been circulating on the Internet, but I have been receiving so many e-mails from other MS patients and also comments on the different MS forums that I visit daily about these articles.

Here is just a small snippet from the responses that I sent to many of the different reporters/articles that were written:

"Your article was very disheartening to say the least because you failed to mention the following and your article does not tell the whole story:

"Might the drug have caused melanoma in these two MS patients? It's possible", says Timothy K. Vartanian, MD, PhD, chief of the MS division at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. Vartanian and colleagues report the two cases in a letter to the Feb. 7 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

"The important thing to remember is that Tysabri remains by far the most effective FDA-approved drug for treating relapsing forms of MS" stated Vartanian. "There are adverse effects associated with all medications..."

According to the WebMD article below, both of the women treated by Vartanian and colleagues had existing moles. In fact, one of the women had a family history of melanoma. Her father and a brother had melanomas; both of them remain alive and well.

The report from Vartanian and colleagues does not prove Tysabri caused these patients' melanoma.

The jury is still out, considering there are over 21,000 MS patients currently on Tysabri therapy, and I am one of them, having had 17 Tysabri infusions so far, with not one single relapse nor any disease progression in over a year".

Any MS patient with a history of melanoma in their family should discuss this with their neurologist. They should regularly be evaluated by a dermatologist if they have any mole on their skin and are on Tysabri therapy. These are only my opinions of course, and I am not a doctor. Here is an article from WebMD that addresses these issues in an unbiased manner:

http://tinyurl.com/2lu4s6

Did these articles scare me at all? Heck no! All MS patients have to do is have as much knowledge about Tysabri as possible (and discuss your concerns/questions with your neurologist) in order to fend off these types of "sensationalistic" headlines that precede these biased and slanted media stories.

((((hugs))))

Love, Lauren :)