Multiple Sclerosis Simulator - Boston Globe excerpt May 2, 2007

Multiple sclerosis simulator - Participants experienced loss of balance and coordination, tingling of hands, temperature swings, and impaired vision

When brain specialist Alejandra Gonzalez arrived at the Hynes Convention Center for a medical conference Monday, she did not expect to end her day standing on a treadmill wearing a pair of electrified neoprene gloves.

Her interest was piqued by an exhibit at the American Academy of Neurology meeting that claimed it could create, in a perfectly healthy person, the disorienting symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

So, flirting with being late for her 6:30 evening train, she pulled on the tight black gloves, climbed into a brushed-steel booth, and within a minute was wobbling on a treadmill, a blurry image in front of her, hot air blowing against her back.

Her fingertips vibrated insistently.

"I never thought that the tingling in the hands would be so bothersome," said Gonzalez, a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York who has a number of patients with multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the central nervous system slowly deteriorates.

The machine, commissioned for the meeting by Cambridge drug maker Biogen Idec Inc. and Elan Pharmaceuticals Inc., drew a line of doctors like Gonzalez who were curious to experience how it might feel to have a perplexing disease known for its random, debilitating attacks on the brain and spine. With a video, headphones, and two wobbly treadmill tracks, the machine attempted to mimic the lack of coordination, blurred vision, and other signs of an attack.

"Even though you try hard to imagine how they feel, it's just not possible," Gonzalez said of her patients.

Art Mellor, a multiple sclerosis patient who runs a research foundation for the disease, went through the simulator an hour after it opened Monday, not long after Gonzalez. He was impressed by the way the coffee cup simulated the sudden loss of coordination -- "that's what it's like," he said -- and by the thick vibrating gloves. It wasn't so much the feeling while the battery-powered gloves were turned on, he said, but the eerie after-effect of taking them off -- a disturbing residual buzz that has become a permanent part of Mellor's life.

Mellor said the booth could serve a valuable purpose, since multiple sclerosis patients often don't have outwardly detectable symptoms and must depend on doctors believing their verbal descriptions. Some patients, he said, get "the equivalent of 'suck it up,' or 'Oh, come on, it's not that bad.' "

But there's one feeling the booth can't replicate. When the video ends, so do the symptoms for those in the simulator. Multiple sclerosis patients, however, are stuck with a degenerative disease that even the best drugs can inhibit only temporarily.

"It's that slow build up over time that just eats away at you," Mellor said.