Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 7, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043061
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Funding
- National institute of health (NIH) [R01 NS051623]
- Merck Serono
- Novartis
- Teva Pharmaceutical Industries ltd.
- Biogen
- Teva
- Bayer
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Objectives: Multiple sclerosis (MS) in African-Americans (AAs) is characterized by more rapid disease progression and poorer response to treatment than in Caucasian-Americans (CAs). MRI provides useful and non-invasive tools to investigate the pathological substrate of clinical progression. The aim of our study was to compare MRI measures of brain damage between AAs and CAs with MS. Methods: Retrospective analysis of 97 AAs and 97 CAs with MS matched for age, gender, disease duration and age at MRI examination. Results: AA patients had significantly greater T2- (p = 0.001) and T1-weighted (p = 0.0003) lesion volumes compared to CA patients. In contrast, measurements of global and regional brain volume did not significantly differ between the two ethnic groups (p>0.1). Conclusions: By studying a quite large sample of well demographically and clinically matched CA and AA patients with a homogeneous MRI protocol we showed that higher lesion accumulation, rather than pronounced brain volume decrease might explain the early progress to ambulatory assistance of AAs with MS.
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