CRIMSON: Considering Risk and Benefits in Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Selection

CRIMSON: Considering Risk and Benefits in Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Selection.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an incurable disease, but there are a range of disease modifying treatments (DMTs) which can reduce the number and severity of relapses, accumulation of brain lesions and may slow disability progression. However the DMTs have side effects ranging from minor (e.g. a rash) to major e.g. rare viral infections, so decisions about taking DMTs are best made by carefully considering and weighing factors including individual lifestyle, disease course, known side effects, and the potential risks and benefits of the different treatments.

The aim of CRIMSON is to improve the understanding of whether (and how) people with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis trade-off likely risk/harms against benefits in making treatment choices, in order to develop ways of supporting this decision-making process.

We will conduct a large scale discrete choice experiment using access to patients in the UKMS register. The register will allow us to readily identify those patients relatively recently diagnosed as well as those with longer duration and severity to target specific groups of interest. By examining the choices people with MS are prepared to make using a survey method with many hundreds of participants we can start to quantify and rank patient preferences across a range of characteristics associated with treatments.

Of particular interest is heterogeneity across patient groups, and the statistical analysis will use methods such as mixed-logit regressions that allow for investigation of such heterogeneity.

CMC members involved: David Meads