Review of the novelties presented at the 29th Congress of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) (II)
*Corresponding author: Dr. Óscar Fernández Fernández. Director del Instituto de Neurociencias Clínicas. Hospital Regional Universitario Carlos Haya. Avda. Carlos Haya, s/n. E-29010 Málaga.
E-mail: oscar.fernandez.sspa@juntadeandalucia.es
Summary. The most relevant data presented at the 29th Congress of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS), held in October 2013 in Denmark, were summarised at the sixth edition of the Post-ECTRIMS Expert Meeting, held in Madrid in October 2013, resulting in this review, which is being published in three parts. This second part of the Post-ECTRIMS review focuses on diagnostic imaging and differential diagnosis, the clinical and paraclinical monitoring of neurodegeneration, progression and disability, and functional imaging and neural connectivity. It is clear that conventional multiple sclerosis sequences remain essential for the diagnosis, differential diagnosis and disease monitoring, that new MRI techniques help to assess the neurodegenerative process, and that some of the new sequences are more specific to neuroaxonal injury. Very high field magnetic resonance imaging allows better understanding of the lesion load, distribution and heterogeneity of the lesions, and positron emission tomography studies offer new insight into the patho-physiology of the disease. Functional imaging and neural connectivity studies show that there is cortical reorganisation in multiple sclerosis, whose equilibrium with structural damage is responsible for the impairment.
