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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common cause of physical disability in young adults. The “Holy Grail” of MS research is to find a treatment that stops relapses, halts progression of the disease, and induces recovery from any disability. At the moment a number of treatments have been investigated that have aimed at a target some way short of this, slowing progression of the disease. The interpretation of these studies has been controversial with debates over clinical efficacy often being sidelined by issues of health economics.
In this supplement we are not going to review the trials of drugs aimed at disease modification, as this is still an evolving field that is still being widely discussed in the neurological literature. Neurological trainees need to familiarise themselves with the primary trial data that underpins this debate, and the main trials are listed below. We have also included some of the papers discussing the health economics effects of these drugs.
To help evaluate these studies it might be worth considering some of the features of an idealised and unfortunately impossible trial of …