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.

Identification of molecular biomarkers for multiple sclerosis.

Fossey SC, Vnencak-Jones CL, Olsen NJ, Sriram S, Garrison G, Deng X, Crooke PS, Aune TM

Department of Pathology, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashvill, Tennessee, USA.

Multiple sclerosis is a demyelinating disease of the central nervous system with a presumed autoimmune etiology. Previous microarray analyses identified conserved gene expression signatures in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of patients with autoimmune diseases. We used quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis to identify a minimum number of genes of which transcript levels discriminated multiple sclerosis patients from patients with other chronic diseases and from controls. We used a computer program to search quantitative transcript levels to identify optimum ratios that distinguished among the different categories. A combination of a 4-ratio equation using expression levels of five genes segregated the multiple sclerosis cohort (n=55) from the control cohort (n=49) with a sensitivity of 91% and specificity of 98%. When autoimmune and other chronic disease groups were included (n=78), this discriminator still performed with a sensitivity of 79% and a specificity of 87%. This approach may have diagnostic utility not only for multiple sclerosis but also for other clinically complex autoimmune diseases.

Published 26 March 2007 in J Mol Diagn, 9(2): 197-204.
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