Advancing Multiple Sclerosis Diagnosis With the 2024 Criteria Revision: Xavier Montalban, MD, PhD

WATCH TIME: 4 minutes

"We are now moving towards a more biological diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and this is essential. This is happening as well in other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson and Alzheimer [disease]. We don't need symptoms to make the diagnosis of one specific disease, because once we have symptoms, we are a little bit late.”

At the recently concluded 2024 European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) Congress, September 18-20, in Copenhagen, Denmark, several clinicians, including Xavier Montalban, MD, PhD, participated in a scientific session on the newly revised McDonald criteria. The session was cochaired by Peter Calabresi, MD, codirector of the Precision Medicine MS Center at Johns Hopkins University, and Mar Tintoré, MD, PhD, senior consultant of the Multiple Sclerosis Centre of Catalonia at Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron in Barcelona.

Other speakers apart of the session included Wallace Brownlee, MBChB, PhD, FRACP, a consultant neurologist at Queen's Square MS Center in London, United Kingdom, as well as Marcello Moccia, MD, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Naples, and more. During the session, topics talked about by the speakers included practical implementation of the new criteria, moving towards a unified set of diagnostic criteria for MS, the impact of adding optical coherence tomography in the MS criteria, as well as validating proposed 2023 radiologically isolated syndrome criteria.

Following the meeting, Montalban, the chair of neurology at Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron, sat down with NeurologyLive^® to discuss how the 2024 revisions of the MS diagnostic criteria will improve early diagnosis and patient outcomes. Montalban, who also serves as the chief of the Neuroimmunology Group at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute, talked about the role of MRI advancements and biomarkers in the new MS diagnostic criteria. Moreover, he spoke about how the inclusion of the optic nerve as a fifth typical topography will potentially impact MS diagnosis in clinical practice.

Click here for more coverage of ECTRIMS 2024.