September 27, 2021
Researchers observed a continuous decrease in the time to MS diagnosis and treatment initiation across diagnostic criteria periods during the past 25 years, according to results of a retrospective study published in Neurology.
“The establishment of different MS criteria over the last decades has enabled diagnosing patients in earlier stages of the disease, thereby offering these patients more opportunities to benefit from disease-modifying drugs at an earlier time, which could imply a better disease control in terms of disability,” Mar Tintore, MD, PhD, of the department of neurology/neuroimmunology at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Spain, and colleagues wrote.
“Although a recent study has shown a decrease in the risk of reaching disability milestones in recent years, others did not find this shifting trajectory over time,” the authors continued. “Furthermore, information in previous studies was collected at the time of MS diagnosis but not at the time of the first episode, the so-called clinically isolated syndrome (CIS).”
Investigators sought to determine whether the course of MS had changed in the past several decades by analyzing prospectively collected data from 1,174 individuals included in the Barcelona-CIS cohort between 1994 and 2020.
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