Oct 17 2007
When someone has multiple sclerosis, it's expensive to detect the changes caused by this disease. Researchers at John Hopkins have recently announced that they have found that a five-minute eye exam could be used to help detect changes in the brain caused by multiple sclerosis. Over 400,000 Americans are affected by multiple sclerosis.
Multiple sclerosis affects the brain and makes it shrink. Currently the only way to determine the amount of brain shrinkage that has occurred in a multiple sclerosis patient is to have an expensive MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan done.
Researchers at John Hopkins have found that an inexpensive, five-minute eye exam (called an OCT) can be as effective as brain imagining in detecting shrinkage of someone's brain. If someone has MS, treatment can stall the effects even though it cannot reverse damage.
In addition to being far less expensive than imaging scans, the eye scan is also much quicker taking only one-tenth as long to do. Faster and cheaper tests could mean that people who are being treated for MS might be able to get scans done more frequently which would give them more information regarding the success of their treatments.
Finally, MRI can only detect changes in the brain once the disease has sufficiently progressed. The OCT can detect subtle changes and may be more useful in helping to detect MS earlier. Like other diseases, the earlier MS is detected, the more effective the treatments are.
"This is an encouraging result. MRI is an imperfect tool that measures the result of many types of tissue loss rather than specifically nerve damage itself. With OCT we can see exactly how healthy these nerves are, potentially in advance of other symptoms," said Peter Calabresi, M.D., a neurologist at John Hopkins and the lead author of the study.
Researchers based their study on 40 patients who had MS. They used an OCT, optical coherence tomography, scan that looked at the different layers of nerves within the optic nerves in their eyes. This scan allowed them to "see" brain cells and allowed them to detect damage to the nerves within the brain.
Using OCT scans, they can detect changes in brain tissue that can be caused by several different problems, not just MS. Therefore, further study is warranted.
The study will appear in the October 2007 issue of Neurology.