Demographic and Clinical Characteristics of Familial and Sporadic Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Shahrzad Mokhtari; Shakiba Houshi; Omid Mirmosayyeb; Mahdi Barzegar; Alireza Afshari-Safavi; Majid Ghasemi; Vahid Shaygannejad

doi:10.4103/ijpvm.ijpvm_187_22

Demographic and Clinical Characteristics of Familial and Sporadic Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Int J Prev Med. 2023 Jun 22:14:86. doi: 10.4103/ijpvm.ijpvm_187_22. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Shahrzad Mokhtari¹, Shakiba Houshi², Omid Mirmosayyeb³, Mahdi Barzegar¹, Alireza Afshari-Safavi⁴, Majid Ghasemi¹, Vahid Shaygannejad¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Medicine, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran.
² School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
³ Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, Isfahan Neurosciences Research Center, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
⁴ Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Faculty of Health, North Khorasan University of Medical Sciences, Bojnurd, Iran.

Abstract

Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, inflammatory, demyelinating, immune-mediated disease of the central nervous system. It is still unestablished whether heredity correlates with the disease's progression and severity.

Methods: This study includes the patients with MS seen in the MS clinic of Kashani Hospital, affiliated with Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, from January 2019 to January 2020. We gathered data regarding the demographic and clinical characteristics, such as type of disease and family history of MS. Patients were grouped based on having relatives with MS. We compared demographic and clinical characteristics between those with a family history of MS (familial MS: FMS) and those without a family history of MS (sporadic MS: SMS).

Results: We included 2,929 MS patients, 523 (17.2%) with FMS and 2,406 (82.8%) with SMS. Patients with FMS were found to have active lesions in the thoracic spine more frequently than those with SMS (P = 0.022). We also found differences in the distribution of gender (P = 0.036) and the frequency of having active brain lesions (P = .024) among patients with FMS and SMS. No difference was found between the demographic/clinical characteristics and the number of affected relatives in the family.

Conclusions: Significant differences were found among different groups of patients in terms of demographical and clinical characteristics.

Keywords: Familial multiple sclerosis; magnetic resonance imaging; multiple sclerosis.