Relapse, Remission, and Progression in Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is the most common cause of severe neurologic disability in adults of northern European origin. At postmortem examination, the cardinal pathological features are multiple areas of focal loss of myelin with relative preservation of axons, a variable amount of inflammation, and astrocytic gliosis. There is general agreement that multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disorder, although recent studies have raised the possibility that there is more than one pathway to the final pathological changes and that different pathways may predominate in different clinical forms of multiple sclerosis.1 What are the characteristics of the different forms of multiple sclerosis? At . . .