Austria's Dr. Franz Schelling, now retired, worked as a family doctor trained in radiology and neurology, and had spent much of his professional life working with MS patients. His revolutionary theory: Poor blood flow from patients' brains might be caused by damaged veins, and this created the MS symptoms.

But nobody listened, and Schelling's pleas for more study were repeatedly rejected. They insisted that the disease is caused by immune problems, not vascular.

Schelling went to Vienna, New York, London and elsewhere, asking researchers to investigate the MS link to veins. But no one was interested, and his work seemed to have gone nowhere.

Not so, however. Along came a former Italian vascular surgeon who picked up where Dr. Schelling left off.

Paolo Zamboni was a professor at the University of Ferrara in northern Italy. When his wife, Elena, was diagnosed with MS a decade ago, he began an intense search into the cause of her disease. He soon found that scientists who had studied the brains of MS patients came across higher levels of iron, which formed, a unique pattern. These patterns were often clustered around the veins that normally drain blood from the head. Why did this happen?

Dr. Zamboni then made an astonishing discovery with Doppler Ultrasound. He found that nearly 100 per cent of MS patients had a narrowing, twisting or outright blockage of the veins that are supposed to flush blood from the brain. He checked these veins in healthy people, and found none of these malformations. Nor did he find these blockages in those with other neurological conditions.

Equally astounding was the discovery that the blood was not only flowing out of the brain, it was "refluxing" reversing and flowing back upwards. This led to his groundbreaking hypothesis: That as the blood moves into the brain, pressure builds in the veins, which in turn forces blood into the brain's grey matter where it sets off a host of reactions, possibly explaining the symptoms of MS.

Zamboni dubbed this vein disorder CCSVI, or Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency, and began publishing his preliminary research in neurology journals.

Further research showed that the severity of the vein blockages corresponded to the severity of the patient's symptoms. Patients with only one vein blocked usually had milder forms of the disease; those with two or more damaged veins had more severe illness. There is much more to be written about CCSVI, and more to be learned. Dr. Schelling is retired now, but Paolo Zamboni is continuing his work, with other doctors who have come into this field. The best is yet to come!