You may have heard or read the term NEDA (pronounced NEED-AH) in Multiple Sclerosis news in the past few months and wondered just what is NEDA and how does it apply to us? NEDA is an acronym for No Evidence of Disease Activity and sounds like the perfect goal to me.
I recently read the report Evaluation of No Evidence of Disease Activity in a 7-Year Longitudinal Multiple Sclerosis Cohort, published online for the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Neurology, and saw the negative numbers of people sustaining NEDA over a long period of time and found the news discouraging. But it gnawed at me that I was missing something because there are a number of researchers looking at this topic and I sensed an underlying enthusiasm for NEDA. I reached out to my MSologist – Dr. Aaron Boster, OhioHealth Neurological Physicians – for an explanation of just what NEDA means in our long term care.
In a lengthy chat he covered again with me a number of points that most of us already know, including:
– Very few of us will remain disease activity free because that just isn’t how MS and our disease modifying therapy drugs work. We are fortunate to have the drugs, but we can still anticipate relapses or worse, they won’t work for us at all and it is not unusual that our disease modifying therapy (DMT) might need to be adjusted/changed.
Read more, here
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