VIDEO: MS treatment choice has little effect on outcomes with low brain atrophy risk

BOSTON — Patients with lower risk of brain atrophy performed similarly across treatment groups, while those at higher risk performed better on more effective therapy, according to a study at the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting.

“The overall objective was to leverage brain atrophy outcomes [in multiple sclerosis] in our heterogeneous treatment effect model and also to look at the possibility of improving upon personalized disease-modifying therapy selection based on those models,” Carrie Michelle Hersh, DO, MSc, FAAN, of Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, said in this Healio video.

“Overall, we were able to see that patients with lower baseline brain atrophy — it really didn’t matter so much what level of disease-modifying efficacy they were treated with,” she said. “However, in a group of patients where they had a higher risk of brain parenchymal fraction change over time, we were able to see that patients who were treated with moderate and high efficacy disease-modifying therapies performed similarly and better compared to patients who were on low efficacy treatment that met statistical significance.”