Results from a clinical trial of more than 250 participants with progressive multiple sclerosisrevealed that ibudilast was better than a placebo in slowing down brain shrinkage. The study also showed that the main side effects of ibudilast were gastrointestinal and headaches. The study was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health, and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Robert J. Fox, M.D., a neurologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, led a team of researchers across 28 clinical sites, including a team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in a brain imaging study to investigate whether ibudilast was better than placebo in reducing the progression of brain atrophy, or shrinkage, in patients with progressive multiple sclerosis.

“This is a landmark study in patients with progressive forms of MS, which have been difficult to treat to date,” said Khurram Bashir, M.D., director of the Division of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis in the UAB Department of Neurology in the School of Medicine. “This study provides hope for a potentially effective therapy and will serve as a pivotal study where a novel outcome measure to study disease progression was used for the first time. This combined MRI outcome measure will likely become the standard for future research in progressive multiple sclerosis.”

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