Welcome to Phoenix Rising!
Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.
LEWELLYN KING: "Do you have hope that, in your lifetime, you'll see a cure for this disease? A therapy?"
ANTHONY KOMAROFF: "Part of my answer depends on how long I think I'm going to be alive. But if I were going to be alive another 20 years, yeah, I think that I would be optimistic we're going to see very good diagnostic tests developed and treatments that definitely improve symptoms.
"'Curative' treatments? I'm not prepared to say that yet because we need to understand what this illness is better before we can have a view as to how easy it would be to cure it."
And you don't need to know the exact cause of a disease to treat it. The cause of MS is still unknown yet they have very effective treatments now for it.Actually, Dr. Komaroff, does not say that there won't be a cure in 20 years. He says that they don't know enough yet to make an estimate. In addition to diagnostic tests, he says that he's optimistic that there will be treatments that definitely improve symptoms within 20 years. In this context, "twenty years" is more like the outside range as opposed to an estimate of how long it will take.
Things could happen much more quickly if a potentially "curable" cause is discovered. This is the kind of discovery we may be seeing with autoimmunity and Rituximab. There are other potentially "curable" sources of the illness as well, such as an altered microbiome that promotes some kind of chronic immune activity. Finding something like this would be akin to the kind of "home run" that Barry Marshal and Robin Warren hit when they linked h. pylori to peptic ulcers. It's rare, but it does happen.
Also, I would not discount the value of developing treatments while searching for a cure. There are many diseases that they've been working on for more than twenty years and that they have literally spent billions on which still have no "cure." Still, treatments have been developed that can manage some of those illnesses. HIV infection is one obvious example. Likewise, there are several treatments for relapsing-remitting MS, but still no outright cure.