One year on glatiramer acetate. Preliminary report on disease activity and disability evolution

Introduction Multiple sclerosis is a devastating demyelinating disease of young adults, which gradually leads to severe disability and finally exitus. Its perfidious character is uncontrolled to this point by any of the existing medications, either the steroids for the relapses, or the various disease modifying drugs. Furthermore, even if these drugs are alleviating severity and are reducing the frequency of relapses in case of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), the lack of efficiency is quasi-total in case of the progressive clinical forms. One of the frequently used disease modifying drugs is glatiramer acetate (GA), a peculiar polymer of four aminoacids, which apparently shares various, still controversial mechanisms – modulating the immune response, mimicking proteins of the CNS, enhancing neuroprotection, etc (Aharoni 2012) – and which presents a diverging impact on the evolutivity of the relapsingremitting multiple sclerosis. In case of paraclinical evaluation of the diseased, follow-up results cannot entirely seen as favorable, although batteries of neurophysiological (Maier et al 2006) and imagery (Cadavid et al 2009) tests were performed in different studies. Sometimes technical limits are not permitting a quantifiable response evaluation (Zivadinov et al 2012). Despite these, one can observe an intriguing fact: the clinical evolution of the patients is better under the treatment, as mentioned before, somehow in disjunction with the instrumental investigations (Khana et al 2001), (Johnson 2012) . In order to objectively assess the clinical evolution, different measures of quantification were needed (Noseworthy 1994). Annual relapse rate gives a good measure of disease activity, but it lacks information about disability. Kurtzke’s Expanded Disability Status Scale was proposed as a measure for the latter, and it is still the most widely used severity scale, used also for clinical trials, although standardization problems are signaled (Hobart et al 2000). Still, the EDSS is not standing out for its fine differential evaluation method of motor disability, and it virtually lacks cognitive evaluation (Hoogervorst et al 2003). To overcome these aspects, another scale was proposed and developed, the Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite (MSFC) (Fischer et al 1999). It covers three dimensions – the timed 25 foot walk test assesses the lower limb disability, the 9-hole peg test is administered to evaluate upper extremity disability and finally the paced auditory serial addition test gives information about cognition, more precisely about auditory information processing and calculation ability (Rudick et al 2002) . It seems, to this point, that the MSFC is the most sensitive scale of disability evaluation in MS, and it is the most frequently used in clinical trials (Ozakbas et al 2004). Still, in completion of the cognitive assessment, other tests are also available, as The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). The latter is considered a rapid test used to investigate different cognitive domains, as attention, memory, language, executive functions, thinking etc. (Krupp et al 2011) . All mentioned scales and measures of activity and progression were applied to our study group; this preliminary report presents only part of these, evaluation, comparison and statistics is ongoing for the others.