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Whitaker Lecture: Closing in on the Cause of MS by Dissecting the Immunology of MS Disease-modifying Therapies
Lecturer: Gavin Giovannoni, MBBCh, PhD, FCP (South Africa), FRCP, FRCPath (Barts and the London Medical School)
As a healthcare professional (HCP), managing MS-specific issues in your patients is not sufficient. We need to go beyond MS. A good place to start is brain health, which is very timely and coincides with the WHO’s position paper on ‘Optimizing brain health across the life course: WHO position paper’ (9-Aug-2022) and dovetails with the ‘Brain Health: Time Matters’ policy report (2015) that has helped shape the way we manage MS globally. Underpinning the report is the principle of managing MS holistically. To achieve this, we need a focus on marginal gains as a treatment philosophy; ‘If we break down everything we can think of that goes into improving MS outcomes and then improving it by 1%, we will get a significant increase when we put them all together’. So how do you achieve this? Several lifestyle and other factors negatively impact brain health and result in worse MS outcomes, e.g., smoking, excess alcohol, co-morbid diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol and blood lipids, poor sleep, recurrent infections, some concomitant medications, a sedentary lifestyle and modifiable social determinants of health. Brain health is part of wellness, which requires practising healthy habits to attain better physical and mental health outcomes so that instead of just surviving, patients will thrive. To thrive, you must also assess how you interact with society and the environment. Wellness encourages patients to focus on their intellectual, emotional, physical, social, spiritual, occupational and environmental well-being. Improving all these little things will optimize MS outcomes. Level of Information: Intermediate
CATEGORY:
Science of MS | Lecture
LEVEL:
Intermediate
CREDIT TYPES AND UNITS:
AAPA: 0.75
ACPE: 0.75
APA: 0.75
AOTA: 0.75
ASWB: 0.75
CME: 0.75
NCPD: 0.75
RD: 0.75