World MS Day - one week on

The headline of the World MS Day event I attended last week in Lisbon was "Time matters in MS - It is time to make a real difference to the lives of people with MS and their families." Here is the program:


Time matters-brochure-digital from Klaus Schmierer

My panel was called "Brain Health Matters in MS", and chaired by Alastair Compston. Perhaps some of you tuned in to watch the live stream and can feed back what they thought of the event. 

Here are the slides of my presentation:



The point I made is that we need to be careful when pushing the - perfectly justified - agenda of early treatment. We should never forget many pwMS have, for various reasons, not had the chance to benefit from such an "early" approach and need to be clear that DMT "as early as possible" may mean for some to get their first DMT many years into the disease, at that point with perhaps quite significant disability. 

The message of my talk is that even at advanced stages of MS people are not "beyond disease modification"; and whilst I used the evidence from a single case to underpin this point, there are no doubt many who can benefit. Our CHARIOT MS trial will test this hypothesis in pwMS with an EDSS of 6.5 - 8.5 (provided we can obtain the funding...). More on this soon!

CoI: BMJ World MS Day in Lisbon; supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Roche. KS; multiple.