Progress toward Mitigating Disability Progression in Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is the most common cause of progressive neurologic disability in young adults. There had been no treatments for the disease, except for glucocorticoids, which were used for more than 25 years before they were shown to reduce the duration and severity of acute relapses but to have no benefit with respect to the accumulation of disability. Then, in 1993, interferon beta was shown to reduce the frequency of relapses and the number and area of lesions on T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain. 1 Since then, more than 20 additional drugs have been approved for multiple sclerosis, . . .