Improving the Lives of People with MS

Steve Adubato goes on-location to the Kessler Foundation’s “Living to the Fullest with MS” Event to speak with Rodger DeRose, President & CEO of the Kessler Foundation, about the advancements the foundation is making to ensure individuals with MS can live life to the fullest.

9/15/17 #2079

Excerpt:

"We're here at Kessler Foundation. I just was honored to moderate a very compelling panel discussion on MS research. Rodger DeRose, who heads up the foundation, let me ask you, you just spoke to this audience, a few folks still here, there's some other folks outside with desserts, but I want to get you before you go out there, because you just spoke to this audience about the impact of this MS research and why it matters so much, particularly those... to those who are suffering and dealing with MS. Talk about that. Well, you know Steve, I think when you're talking about research, rather than being an academic center that's doing research for research's sake, and putting it into publications, and ending it there. Our research goes beyond that. It goes... in terms of winning a grant, it goes into doing the research with patients, and actually getting it into practice. And so that you're actually changing a life in terms of the types of issues related to MS, that we focus on, which are cognition related issues, deficits of being able to think, learn, remember, to communicate, these are all the types of issues that MS patients have after they suffer a series of lesions on the brain. And we do pre-testing with patients, and we do post-testing after we've actually tried an intervention to see what has actually changed in the brain. Or in the spinal cord column. So that we can actually show the impact of our work. One of the things that struck me, and I'll have Rodger talk about this, is that two of the six participants tonight were actually, are actually people who have participated in studies. Talk about the significance, Rodger, of people who are dealing with MS actually participating in the research, and why it matters so much. Not just to them, but to those with MS and future patients, dare I say. You know, it really is a double benefit, Steve. You mentioned the impact that it has in terms of the patient benefitting from the interventions that we're working on, to bring forward to the next generation of MS patients, and to get into practice, not only here at Kessler or the select sites that own all of the Kessler type hospitals around the country, but the world of medical rehabilitation. So that's number one. Number two is that I think that when a patient enters into a trial with research with us, they know that what they're doing is they're helping the next generation of patients. And because this is a disease that has a hereditary component to it, it..."