Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: zero ★’s St Elsewhere is a euphemism in medicine for a fuck-up done under someone else’s watch, i.e. at St Elsewhere’s hospital. In this week’s NEJM there is a tragic case of a 22-year old Pakistani man who was misdiagnosed as having MS at St Elsewhere, started on natalizumab, which was ineffective, before being switched to interferon beta. By the time he was...
Last night when I got home I was emotionally burnt-out. I had done an all-day clinic and saw many difficult and challenging patients with MS, both new and follow-up patients. My wife asked me if I had a good day. I replied that it had been exhausting and that I felt numb. She said there must have been something rewarding in my day’s activities? On reflection, there were a lot of small moments...
Despite advances in MRI, the diagnosis of MS is hard for the non-specialist. A Swiss study recently found that the delay in MS diagnosis is more than 2 years in 40% of PwMS. Surprised? You should be, because according to this study by 2016-2017 the delay in diagnosis had only improved by half as much since the year 2000! What is not surprising, however, is that in a majority of instances this...
In the study below approximately 1 in 5 people diagnosed with MS don’t have MS. This is so much higher than previous studies. I have always quoted the Danish post-mortem studies that sugget only 1 in 20 MSers are misdiagnosed. Maybe Danish neurologists are simply better at diagnosing MS compared to their American colleagues? There is no one test that can be done to diagnose MS. MS is...
The rate of misdiagnosis of MS around the globe is roughly a quarter. We are so focused in making an early diagnosis in MS that before we know it, it’s a runaway train. Sometimes, even the best of us need to eat our words, and admit to having a made a mistake. The diagnosis of MS is not easy; how many of you have googled non-specific symptoms and come up with MS as a potential cause? The...