new treatments? : In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers compared brains taken at autopsy from 11 patients with multiple sclerosis and four people who did not have brain disease. The investigators, led by Dr. Bruce D. Trapp, chairman of the department of neurosciences at the Learner Research Institute of the Cleaveland Clinic Foundation, examined 47 affected areas in the brains of patients with multiple sclerosis. The researchers found that the number of severed nerve cells per cubic millimeter of affected brain ranged from 875 to 11,236, depending on how active the disease was in the brain region.