We have created a specific COVID19 & MS Microsite to curate relevant information for people with MS and their families. The site is being updated on a daily basis. Please use this site to ask clinical questions related to COVID-19 or use the form below. Please note the answers to questions will then appear on the COVID-19 & MS site. Thanks.
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CoI: multiple
Retraction of Publication Rev Neurol (Paris). 2020 Sep 15;S0035-3787(20)30660-3. doi: 10.1016/j.neurol.2020.08.001. Online ahead of print. WITHDRAWN: Incidence and mortality of COVID-19 in Iranian multiple sclerosis patients treated with disease-modifying therapies DOI: 10.1016/j.neurol.2020.08.001 The most damming report of anti-CD20 risk of MS has been withdrawn by the...
Vollmer TL, Cohen JA, Alvarez E, Nair KV, Boster A, Katz J, Pardo G, Pei J, Raut P, Merchant S, MacLean E, Pradhan A, Moss B. Safety results of administering ocrelizumab per a shorter infusion protocol in patients with primary progressive and relapsing multiple sclerosis. Mult Scler Relat Disord. 2020 Aug 18;46:102454. COVID-19 has focused attention to the amount of time people are kept in the...
The blurring of vision in MS is synonymous with optic neuritis in most instances, however visual defects also occur secondary to lesions in the brain proper. These are often silent or misconstrued as the former. Below is a pictorial representation of potential field defects based on the area of lesion location within the visual pathways of the brain: Little is known of the evolution of these...
If you are a Healthcare Professional (HCP) and are interested in getting up to speed on some advanced topics around the management of MS please take a look at the programme below. We converted our November meeting to be virtual, which has opened some spaces for more people to attend. Please register via the following link: Advanced MS Academy 4-6 November 2020 Online. If you have any queries...
Today is hard core science day. We can learn a bit together. You can learn a lot for the human experiment, which is the clinical trial. Success of trial points the finger at something important, but failure can too. We thought what works in arthritis (MS of the Joint) would work in MS (arthritis of the brain). That was until we tried tumour necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitory activity. It is...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★ Mouse Doctor studied zoology and as a result, he tends to use animal analogies to describe various phenomena. In the past, he has been known to use his favourite invertebrates to describe some neurologists or even groups of neurologists. Why invertebrates? If anyone comes up with the correct answer I will send you an MRI scanner lego set as a prize. ...
There are some people who do not respond to drugs. This can be for genetic reasons. There are people who do not deplete after treatment with alemtuzumab. There will be people that on’t respond well to rituximab/ocrelizumab and there are people that will not respond to cladribine. If you don’t deplete the lymphocytes, the drug may not work. So it is always improtant to monitor this...
Prof Laura Airas is based in Turku PET Centre, Turku, Finland and writes about their recent paper. Disclosures She has received honoraria from Biogen, Roche., Genzyme, Merck Serono and Teva, and institutional research grant support from Finnish Academy, Sigrid Juselius Foundation, Nancy Davis Foundation, Biogen, Genzyme, Merck Serono and Novartis. Prof Laura Airas writes Brain microglial...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: zero stars or one ★ depending on your disposition I prepared this post not knowing that Prof. Laura Airas has submitted a guest post in response to a request from the Mouse Doctor. Before reading this post please make sure you read her blog post first. It provides an important counterbalance to my contrarian view below. Thank you. More than 20 years ago, when I was...
Yesterday I was involved in a debate “Anti-CD20 therapies should be used as Immune Reconstitution Therapies rather than maintenance therapies“. I feel that I got a preverbial ass-kicking and the audience favoured keeping the status Quo and treating with anti-CD20….forever. My take was that the biology and preliminary data is reasonably clear but we need a trial to address the...