Prognostic information for people with MS: Impossible or inevitable?

Heesen, Christoph, Scalfari, Antonio and Galea, Ian (2018) Prognostic information for people with MS: Impossible or inevitable? Multiple Sclerosis Journal. (doi:10.1177/1352458518807101).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Delivering prognostic information is a challenging issue in medicine and has been largely neglected in the past. A major reason has been a suspected nocebo effect of pessimistic estimates, although this is largely unproven. Among people with multiple sclerosis (MS), there is a strong unmet need to receive long-term prognostic information. This viewpoint discusses reasons for this blind spot in physicians' attitude, foremost among which is the uncertainty of prognostic estimates. Possible strategies to move forward include tools to identify matching patients from large well-defined databases, to deliver an evidence-based individualized estimate of long-term prognosis, and its confidence interval, in a clinical setting.

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Heesen et al 2018_accepted - Accepted Manuscript

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Accepted/In Press date: 20 September 2018

e-pub ahead of print date: 16 October 2018

Additional Information: I was not correspondig author. I had not seen final proofs. I realized today this article had been e-published ahead of print on 18/10/18 with my wrong institutional credentials. I have written to the journal and corresponding author to request rectification.

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