Dr Tanuja Chitnis Details How Clinicians Are Understanding Patients' Overall Disease Course in MS

A tool at Brigham and Women’s Hospital allows clinicians to view profiles of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) as a snapshot to better understand their overall disease course, said Tanuja Chitnis, MD, associate neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Transcript

Can you explain the MS profile tool that you use to provide a snapshot of patients’ status? What information does it capture and how is the snapshot used in treatment?

At the Partners Multiple Sclerosis Center at Brigham Women’s Hospital, we’ve developed a tool, which is called MS Patient Profile, and this is really built from our CLIMB [Comprehensive Longitudinal Investigations at the Brigham Women’s Hospital] Study, where we are collecting very detailed clinical information, information about relapses, treatment, disability scores, as well as MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging] measures.

And using all of this information, we’ve creating a graph, basically a view in which we can see relapses and treatments and also the change in MRI measures, including brain atrophy and T2 lesions. And this helps to provide just a snapshot to clinicians who are treating patients to understand their overall disease course: is this someone who has responded to treatments? What types of treatments? And overall, are they more or less inflammatory?

We’re hoping to add in additional biomarkers and we’re actively working on this and this could be a decision-making tool for clinicians. And so, that is an active research project.