Patients were first given a limited course of mitoxantrone, before being started on copaxone, usually a few months later. In Ayres' case, recovery was rapid. "From barely being able to wave my hand to walking out of the rehabilitation center took a few weeks," she says.

While the study has clearly generated some impressive results, many experts say more time is needed.

"It's a small study with no control group," says Dr Robyn Wolintz, co-director of the MS Center at Maimonedes Medical Center in New York. "They also gave different people different doses of mitoxantrone, and that's not standard," says Wolintz, explaining that changing the dosages and the frequency of the treatment makes it difficult to reproduce these results to verify the drugs' efficacy.

"We're talking about an early, small study," says David Harrison, of the MS Society in the United Kingdom. Though Harrison characterized the results as "encouraging," he believes it is necessary to conduct a large-scale comparative investigation to establish how the mitoxantrone-copaxone combination ranks against other known and potential drug cocktails.

Still, some experts believe Boggild and his colleagues have stumbled upon a valid hypothesis. "Single drugs are not what gets the job done," says Dr John Richert, vice-president of research department in the United States' National MS Society. "It really is likely that more and more combination therapies will be used."

For patients with particularly aggressive MS, the proposed treatment may provide some hope. "The people who could benefit from this have nothing else at their disposal," says Wolintz.

And unfortunately, medicine is far from an exact science. "Many physicians make their decisions based on incomplete data," says Richert. "Even though there's not sufficient data to make any kind of formal recommendation, there is enough data to say that it is reasonable to make this option available to physicians and their patients when they've weighed all the pros and cons of the situation."

For patients like Ayres, who still takes daily injections of copaxone, life without the treatment is unimaginable. "When I was lying in my hospital bed, not even able to twitch my toes, I was jealous of anyone who could walk," she told The Associated Press.

Despite the potential side effects, which include leukemia and cardiac problems, Ayres says the treatment was worth the risk. "I didn't have a lot of options," she says, "and to be completely normal now was worth everything that I went through."

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