Brain atrophy at onset and physical disability in multiple sclerosis

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate if brain atrophy in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients during the disease onset predicts long term disability. METHODS: MS patients with follow-up time of at least 7 years from disease onset and with baseline and second magnetic resonance 12 months later were included to measure brain atrophy. Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) was categorized in three groups, EDSS=0, EDSS=1 and 2.5 and EDSS>2.5, and used as disability measure. RESULTS: Twenty-six patients were included. Mean atrophy during the first year in patients that reached an EDSS≥3 was -0.76±0.45 %, in patients with an EDSS between 1 and 2.5 was -0.59±0.56, while in patients with an EDSS of 0 it was -0.38±0.42 (p=0.003). DISCUSSION: Brain atrophy rates during the first year of disease were predictive of disease progression in our population.

The natural history of brain volume loss among patients with multiple sclerosis: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis

“…Of the 38 articles, 8 were clinical trials [14,20,26,27,31,39,50,51] and 30 were observational studies [15][16][17][18][19][21][22][23][24][25][28][29][30][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. Nine studies included a healthy control arm [15,21,23,27,32,40,[48][49][50].…”

“…Nine studies included a healthy control arm [15,21,23,27,32,40,[48][49][50]. A majority of the studies (N = 20) recruited only relapsing-remitting (RR) MS patients [14,[16][17][18]20,23,[26][27][28]31,33,35,37,[39][40][41][42]47,48,51]. Sixteen studies recruited primary progressive (PP) MS and secondary progressive (SP) MS patients [15,21,22,24,25,29,30,32,34,36,38,[43][44][45][46]49].…”

“…Among the 34 studies reporting EDSS at baseline, the mean scores ranged from 1.1 to 6.0 [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. The reported brain volume algorithms were SIENA [14,16,17,22,24,25,[27][28][29][30][31]33,[37][38][39][41]…”

“…In a majority of the studies, it was unclear how the authors addressed potential confounders. Of the 30 observational studies, seven studies [19,36,40,41,43,44,46] did not account for potential confounders in the analyses.…”

“…Seventeen studies reported annualized mean PBVC [12,14,15,23,[27][28][29]31,[35][36][37][39][40][41][43][44][45]. Of those 17 studies, 6 reported longitudinal PBVC measures [14,17,31,33,38,39].…”