A committee of the American Academy...

A committee of the American Academy of Neurology has released a report onward the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in patients with suspected multiple sclerosis (MS) The report was published in the September 2003 issue of Neurology and is available online at: http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/full/61/5/602.

Until lately confirmation of the diagnosis of M generally has required sum of two units or more distinct events separated in time (generally from more than one month) and involvement of at least pair areas of the central nervous method Alternative diagnoses also must be exclud at laboratory and radiographic tests.

With the advent of MRI techniques, cabalistic disease activity now can be demonstrated in 50 to 80 percent of patients at the time of the first clinical presentation. Prospective studies have shown that the nearness of lesions predicts future conversion to clinically definite M Among young to middle-aged adults with a clinically isolated syndrome and alternative diagnoses exclud at baseline, more than 80 percent with three or more white-matter lesions forward a T2-weighted MRI scan exhibit clinically definite MS within seven to 10 years. The carriage of at least two gadolinium (Gd)-enhancing lesions at baseline and the appearance of strange T2 lesions or new Gd enhancement forward follow-up scans also are highly predictive of the progressive growth of clinically definite MS in the near future

COPYRIGHT 2004 American Academy of Family Physicians

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