John Corboy, MD: The DISCO-MS Trial

“We’ll hopefully have an idea, at least in that subpopulation [of patients ≥55 years], whether or not it is safe to discontinue disease-modifying therapy as we currently understand their use.”

In multiple sclerosis (MS) treatment, the debate often surrounds the decision on which, and how to best use, disease-modifying therapies (DMTs). However, some researchers have begun to ask what would happen if older patients discontinued the use of DMTs.

John Corboy, MD, is one of those researchers. As part of the DISCO-MS trial, he and colleagues have enrolled patients with MS who are 55 years and older, in order to examine how the risk of relapses and new MRI lesions is affected by the halting of DMTs. It is expecting results in 2020 (NCT03073603).

As Corboy noted, patients with progressed disease often have a slowing of disease activity, and thus fewer relapses and lesions tend to occur. This idea gave him and his peers the desire to find out if those who stop using the medications will have essentially similar outcomes.

At the 34th Congress of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) in Berlin, Germany, the professor of neurology at Colorado University sat with NeurologyLive to speak about the ongoing trial.