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Multiple Sclerosis

Making a Plan for MS: Why Start Treatment?

Summary & Participants

When people learn they have MS, they are sometimes confused and ambivalent about taking medicine. Listen to experts discuss why starting treatment early may be a good plan of action.

Medically Reviewed On: July 09, 2008

Webcast Transcript

KAREN BLITZ-SHABBIR, DO: I would say the buzzword now with MS, early treatment and staying on treatment and that's because what we know about this disease on MRI shows that, even when the patient is not active, the MRI is active and we think that has long-term consequences.

ANDREW PACHNER, MD: Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the nervous system. It's an interesting disease in that it is restricted to the nervous system. It's cause is unknown. Sometimes the damage is repaired, sometimes it's not, and this occurs over the course of anywhere from five years to a lifetime.

KAREN BLITZ-SHABBIR, DO: People can come with all kinds of symptoms, but I would say the predominant are sensory. Numbness in an arm, tingling, visual problems, loss of vision in an eye, those are the most common symptoms.

ANDREW PACHNER, MD: It's just a question of the unpredictability of where the problem, where the lesion occurs and what is controlled by the nervous tissue in that region that's damaged.

ANNOUNCER: The current thinking is that once MS is diagnosed, it's important to begin treatment immediately.

KAREN BLITZ-SHABBIR, DO: There have been several studies to date showing that early treatment is very, not only effective, but it changes the course of the disease and, if you get treated later, you never quite catch up.

ANNOUNCER: Medications have been created to effectively curb the frequency and severity of multiple sclerosis attacks. One kind of treatment uses interferons.

ANDREW PACHNER, MD: Interferons are proteins made by your body, made as part of the immune system response to some stimulus.

ANNOUNCER: All three interferons appear to be equally effective.

ANDREW PACHNER, MD: There is no, at this point, clear evidence one way or the other. They decrease the number of active lesions, active MS areas in your MRI and the second thing that they do is they decrease the number of attacks.

KAREN BLITZ-SHABBIR, DO: The interferons, we think start to work pretty quickly. If you look at MRI, the decrease in lesion accumulation occurs in a month or two.

ANNOUNCER: Interferons do differ in their tendency to produce what's known as neutralizing antibodies.

KAREN BLITZ-SHABBIR, DO: If you develop a neutralizing antibody, you neutralize the effect of the drug; it makes it so that the drug does not work any more. We know that, with Avonex, the likelihood of developing a neutralizing antibody is very low, 5 percent. We know that, with Betaseron, the likelihood is any where between 30 and 45 percent, and, with Rebif, it's about 25 percent.

ANNOUNCER: The medications can all be self-injected, but on different schedules and in different ways.

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