1Nahid Beladi Moghadam, 1Mahran Ghaffari, 2Saba Sadeghi Rashed, 1Tannaz Fazli, 1Omid Hesami

1Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran; 2Islamic Azad University Central Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran

Introduction:

Patients with benign multiple sclerosis (BMS) represent 10–20% of patients with MS, and are characterized by accumulation of modest or no disability over a long period of time. There is currently no generally accepted definition of BMS but most definitions are based on EDSS in connection with disease duration, i.e. EDSS ≤3.0 after 15 years’ disease duration. The aim of this study was to determine the demographic and clinical characteristics of patients with benign MS (BMS) and compare them with non-benign MS (non-BMS) patients over the same period.

Material(s) and Method(s):

Among the 160 patients admitted to the study, 50 were BMS patients and 110 were non-BMS patients. All patients underwent clinical examination and data was gathered on age, sex, marital, educational, and job status as demographic features and clinical features as well as MRI findings and disease-modifying therapies (DMTs).

Result(s):

The majority of patients in both groups were female (P=0.794) in the age range of 20-40 years (P=0.206) with no significant difference. No significant difference was observed in demographic features between the two groups but in educational and job status. In the BMS group, the frequency of people with undergraduate and postgraduate was significantly higher (P <0.001) than non-BMS, as well as half of BMS, were employed while more than 80% of patients in the non-BMS group were either unemployed or housewives (P <0.001). On the other hand, there were no significant differences in clinical features. Optic neuritis had no significant difference (P = 0.056) in BMS group (38.8%) compared to the non-BMS group (23.8%). Also, there was no significant difference regarding the brainstem symptom at the beginning of the disease and the mean frequency of relapses in both groups was similar at different intervals and no significant difference was observed. About the extent of lesions in the first year in patients; callosal lesions were reported in 40% of BMS patients and 52.8% of non-BMS patients with no significant difference. About the onset time of DMT, there was a significant difference (P value <0.020) which in the BMS group was the first year (48% of patients) and in the non-benign group was four years and more.

Conclusion(s):

In our study, no significant difference was observed between the demographic except for educational and job status. No association was found between the presence of cervical lesions between BMS and non-BMS patients.