24th April 2021, Expert Meeting. This video interview with Bart Van Wijmeersch is based on the slide deck “Individualized Prognosis in MS” by Celia Oreja-Guevara & Bart Van Wijmeersch and brings out the key points.
ABSTRACT
This video interview with Bart Van Wijmeersch is based on the slide deck “Individualized Prognosis in MS” by Celia Oreja-Guevara & Bart Van Wijmeersch and brings out the key points.
One of the biggest challenges for the neurologist treating an MS patient is to gain insight into how that patient’s disease will progress over time. Will the patient be stable on a first-line therapy, or will the disease progress quickly if not treated aggressively? In other words, what is this patient’s prognosis?
In this ParadigMS presentation, Professors Bart Van Wijmeersch and Celia Oreja-Guevara share with you their wealth of experience concerning patient prognosis. By looking carefully at clinical and imaging parameters as well as employing electrophysiological techniques and biomarkers at baseline and during treatment, the information in this presentation will help you to identify prognostic ‘red flags’ commonly seen in MS patients. When all of these factors are brought together under the umbrella of one ‘prognostication tool’, neurologists will have a powerful way to provide a personalised treatment strategy for their MS patients.
QUESTIONS ASKED IN THIS VIDEO INTERVIEW
- What are the key prognostic factors that serve as red flags leading to disability progression and a more severe MS disease phenotype?
- What responses would you expect neurologists to take if they see such red flags?
- What might be the outcome if not action is taken, or if action is taken much later?
- How do the MAGNIMS and Río scores orient us to the risk of disease activity? What impact do the different DMTs have on these scores?
- What is your strategy for “personalised patient prognosis” when a patient first sees you in your consulting rooms?
- Can you tell us your plans for a “prognostication tool”?
- How do you envisage that this tool will be implemented (treatment goals, individualise prognosis, before and during treatment, action to take with respect to changes)?
BIOGRAPHY
BART VAN WIJMEERSCH
Bart Van Wijmeersch is a neurologist specialized in Multiple Sclerosis. He is medical director of the Rehabilitation and MS Center in Pelt where he leads the multidisciplinary MS-team. Furthermore, he is an associate professor of Neurology at the University of Hasselt, affiliated with the Biomedical Institute, where he’s involved in pre-clinical as well as the clinical research on MS at the biomedical institute (BIOMED). He has a supporting role in all the immunological research on blood- and CSF samples of persons with MS and in EAE-animal models, as well as in the rehabilitation research at REVAL. Immunological, Biomarker, MRI, Electrophysiological and Rehabilitation research in MS come together in this way. He has an educational role in the faculty of medicine and physiotherapy.
He’s a member of the Belgian Study Group of Multiple Sclerosis, first President of ParadigMS and a member of advisory boards of different pharmaceutical companies with interest in Multiple Sclerosis.
As acknowledgment of his scientific work, he received an honorary award of the Flemish government in the summer of 2019.
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