Managing Pregnancy in MS – Printed text and video

• Click here to download the poster.
  This poster is about relapse rates before, during, and after pregnancy in the MS patient population. It’s a retrospective claims database analysis that was performed looking at administrative claims data that came from IMS Health real-world data claims, which is really the only way in this country that we can have very large datasets that we can analyze for whatever questions are of interest to us.

We care for a lot of young patients in multiple sclerosis, which is unique. Neurology generally is thought of as a specialty of older people, but MS, and a few other subspecialties, really cater to younger populations. In MS in particular, it’s an autoimmune disease, so there are a lot more women than men affected.

Ultimately, we have young women with a chronic, neurologic autoimmune disease, and a lot of our women want to become moms. That’s part of their life goal, so it’s very important to be able to counsel them and to give them real information based on data — what their risks are, what the benefits might be, and how their disease is going to behave before, during, and after pregnancy.

There’s not much information, unfortunately, especially not in the United States. The first and probably the best-performed study in the subject was done in Europe and was published in 1998 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a French group that conducted the study. The author was Confavreux and it was called the PRIMS study. So that project looked at relapse rates before, during, and after pregnancy and really was the first study with few patients, relatively few patients, about 227 I believe, that presented to the world the outcomes of pregnancy and multiple sclerosis and the outcomes of multiple sclerosis as it related to pregnancy.

In the United States … when we did a literature research, we were surprised just to how little is known and published about this. So this is one of the reasons that we’ve undertaken this project.

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