BOSTON -- Mayor Tom Menino's announcement last week that he has Crohn's Disease has focused a lot of interest on the abdominal ailment shared by at least half a million Americans.
NewsCenter 5's Heather Unruh reported that it can be a devastating chronic illness, but in labs in Boston, there is exciting new hope.
Alison Conlon, 29, typifies someone living with Crohn's Disease. She is young and healthy looking on the outside, but inside, she suffers from bouts of debilitating nausea, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
"I just kept thinking I want to be normal. I want to be normal. I'd forgotten what it was like to live pain-free," Conlon said.
Doctors hope to give patients like Conlon a shot at normalcy. They're studying an injectible immune boosting drug called Leukine, which was first approved in 1991 to reduce side effects from chemotherapy. It's now being used in Crohn's, which many doctors believe is a disease of too much intestinal inflammation.
"This is looking at Crohn's as a very different disease. It's suggesting that Crohn's may be actually not too much inflammation, but too little inflammation of the right kind. So rather than suppressing the inflammation, we're actually saying if we can stimulate the right type of inflammation then we can overcome the problem," Massachusetts General Hospital Dr. Joshua Korzenik said.
Crohn's patients could take daily Leukine injections like the way diabetics take insulin.
Korzenik said that Leukine isn't the only newsworthy drug. Doctors are seeing impressive results from other experimental Crohn's Disease treatments.
Like Leukine, they're still being studied and must be approved by the FDA before becoming widely available. But doctors believe they'll help minimize the devastating grip Crohn's has on people's lives.
"I'm very hopeful over the number of new therapies that will be available over the next five years. I think it's tremendous," Korzenik said.
Massachusetts General is actively enrolling Crohn's Disease patients in a number of clinical trials.
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Heather Unruh Reports On Treatment
