Controversial treatment for MS - and another angle for research of IBD

I don't know much about multiple sclerosis, but I see articles about it all the time as I monitor news about autoimmune diseases. I came across an article about a controversial treatment for MS that a person in Britain couldn't get because it hasn't been officially sanctioned by the government yet via clinical trials. For a person with IBD, I found the treatment less interesting than what it suggests about the potential cause of the disease.

Here's a really short excerpt just to give you an idea:

In 2005, Zamboni’s wife Elena was diagnosed with MS and he embarked on a mission to find out everything about it, from poring over medical literature dating back 100 years or more, to using state-of-the-art body-imaging techniques.

His conclusion was that this wasn’t only an autoimmune disease, but also a vascular one, caused by restricted, blocked, malformed or twisted veins in the trunk and neck. A small study showed that 90 per cent of his patients had venous obstruction. He named the condition chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) and went further, postulating that an excess of iron, which causes inflammation and cell death, was responsible for tipping the immune system out of balance, resulting in MS symptoms.

The treatment was to unblock these twisted or malformed veins (similar to an angioplasty). What I found interesting is that an autoimmune disease, in this case MS, might not just be caused by the environment or genetic susceptibility, it might also include a physical malformation in the body that can be reversed! Might there be something similar with IBD? They should add that to the list of things to research.

UPDATE (8/2/2010): Saw an article in the WSJ about a study that refutes the Zamboni theory regarding jugular vein blockage. Jury is still out I suppose.