Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★ Last Wednesday I chaired a debate about the following case scenario, who many of you may identify as being very close to home. Professor Dawn Langdon, a neuropsychologist, made the case for testing cognition against Professor Nikos Evangelou, a neurologist, who said no we should not assess this patient’s cognition. What would you want if this patient was you? A...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★ As someone with MS do you worry about how you are going to cope with ageing and old age? As MS shreds both your brain and cognitive reserve will MS bring forward and accelerate the ageing process and the time when you may develop neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease? These are all hypotheses but are very relevant to people with MS (pwMS) and...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer – zero stars Someone recently asked what is advanced MS? I suspect they have been getting frustrated with our use of this adjective without a clearer understanding of what it really means. To find out if you have advanced MS you need to put yourself through a battery of stress tests to find-out much reserve you have left to deal with MS and life in the future...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer – zero stars We have been running a campaign that #MS_is_1_not_2_or_3_diseases for sometime. This is based on the biology of MS and not what we see clinically. The pathology that underpins so-called progressive MS is the loss of axons, loss of neurons and loss of synapses, which are the chemical connections between neurons. All three of these processes begin...
If you have MS-related cognitive impairment would you want a treatment to improve your cognitive function? The study below shows that dalfampridine, or fampridine, improves cognition in particular processing speed in MSers with cognitive impairment. Importantly the improvement on the SDMT (Symbol Digit Modalities Test) was greater than 4 points, which is considered clinically meaningful in that...
Many people with MS experience cognitive difficulties (poor concentration, trouble remembering, “cog fog”…). We know quite a bit about how these difficulties play out on formal tests that psychologists use. But we are less good at understanding the experience of people with MS with cognitive difficulties. There are a number of questionnaires that report cognitive difficulties that have been...