Preventive Neurology

I have almost completed a paper with a colleague and friend Viqar Chamoun. He was a contemporary of mine when I did my PhD. Chamoun and I worked in the same laboratory and we spent many hours chewing the cud together. Chamoun is a very deep thinker and got me interested in medical philosophy and the application of logic to defining a disease. Chamoun worked on neurosarcoidosis and developed a set of logical steps to show that contemporary diagnostic criteria for neurosarcoidosis were based on tautology. Despite his logical approach we never got his seminal paper published. The plan is to publish it now and in parallel with a paper defining MS as a biological disease and setting-out the principles of how we should incorporate biomarkers into the diagnostic criteria to improve both the sensitivity and specificity of the current criteria. Viqar Chamoun - thinker extraordinaire   Surprise, surprise one of the biomarkers we want to explore is EBV seropositivity. However, to validate a n...

Obesity is a hot potato topic. People who are overweight don’t want to be fat-shamed. However, it is now evident that given our current environment, which favours a sedentary lifestyle and has a different food landscape to the one our species evolved in, that obesity is a disease. Yes, a metabolic disease that is associated with systemic inflammation, which puts obese people at risk of a large number of diseases including multiple sclerosis and dementia . We estimate that about 10-15% of incident cases of MS could be prevented if we could prevent childhood and adolescent obesity. This is easier said than done. Obesity is now one of the major social determinants of health (SDoH). Obesity is strongly linked to deprivation and lower socioeconomic class. Why? Because cheap food is to blame. I have little doubt that most obesity is attributable to the imbalance in our macronutrient content and the relative excessive consumption of processed and ultra-processed carbohydrates.  Changing ...