The Kenneth P. Johnson Memorial Lecture and the Clinical Course of MS: Benjamin Segal, MD

“What happens in terms of the destructive immune response that transforms the clinical course from a relapsing-remitting pattern to a gradual, progressive accumulation of disability? We don’t really have a good grasp on that.”

Multiple sclerosis (MS) can affect patients in a number of ways, but how the disease presents can change drastically over the course of a patient’s life. This, in turn, affects the way in which physicians must approach its treatment. Many disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) used to treat relapsing-remitting MS are, as Benjamin Segal, MD, puts it, “rendered ineffective in large part” once a patient transitions to progressive MS.

The difference between these states of disease and the inner workings of this transition process was the chosen topic of this year’s Kenneth P. Johnson Memorial Lecture at the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) Forum 2021, February 25-27, by Segal, who is the chair of the Department of Neurology and the director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at The Ohio State University. He additionally discussed how these differences relate to the current state of treatment for MS.

To find out more about the talk and why he chose to focus on this topic, NeurologyLive spoke with Segal in an interview. He offered his perspective on this transition from relapsing-remitting to progressive disease, and how this ultimately impacts treatment.

For more coverage of ACTRIMS Forum 2021, click here.