Multiple Sclerosis Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Multiple Sclerosis, including details on diagnosis, symptoms, treatment, prognosis.

Multiple sclerosis with and without CSF bands: clinically indistinguishable but immunogenetically distinct.

Imrell K, Landtblom AM, Hillert J, Masterman T

Division of Neurology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. kerstin.imrell@ki.se

We sought to determine whether Swedish patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) with and without oligoclonal bands (OCBs) in the CSF constitute distinct subpopulations, clinically and immunogenetically. Our findings indicate that OCB-negative MS shares the same clinical features as OCB-positive MS regarding female predominance, age at onset, proportion of primary progressive cases, rate of MRI positivity, and disease severity. Our HLA-DRB1 genotyping results suggest, however, that OCB-positive and OCB-negative MS are immunogenetically distinct.

Published 26 September 2006 in Neurology, 67(6): 1062-4.
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