Impacts of Health Care-Related Social Determinants of Health

At the 2024 Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers (CMSC) Annual Meeting, NeurologyLive sat down with MS expert Donald Negroski, MD, to discuss several of the top presentations and data on treatment switches and aging in MS. Negroski provided an overview of various presentations, offering his clinical perspective and how findings may impact care going forward.

In this segment, Negroski provided commentary on a first of its kind study showing that health care-related social determinants of health, such as health care access and healthy literacy, may impact brain structure and aging in MS. He gives his greatest takeaways from the study and where efforts should be directed towards going forward.

Transcript edited below for clarity.

Donald Negroski, MD: This was really interesting. They looked at 35 patients, 75% of whom were nonWhite, and calculated accelerated brain aging by special scans looking at cortical thickness and things like that. They tried to correlate that with the patient's chronological age, their kind of brain atrophy, and if they had lack of access to certain health care. And it seems that the patients that had difficulty getting health care had more, more evidence of brain shrinkage in certain areas of the brain. There's probably many reasons for that, but it's a phenomenon, and it may have to do with comorbidities. Maybe you don't see healthcare providers routinely, maybe it's hypertension or whatever, compliance with the MS drugs, etc.