New Challenges
The aging of the population with MS means more people will need disease-modifying medications for a longer period and demand for rehabilitation services and multidisciplinary care will continue to rise.
“Knowing we have an older MS population who will need more support over the course of their lives will affect advocacy and funding of treatment and prevention programs so we can help people stay active and functional longer,” Wallin noted.
Staying on top of changes in incidence and prevalence of neurological and other diseases remains a challenge because of the fractured U.S. healthcare system, patients’ movement between insurers and privacy laws.
“We’re OK with infectious diseases and cancer,” Wallin said, but “for so many diseases, we don’t know how many people have them” in the U.S. or around the world. “That’s an important issue in epidemiology—you want to know these basic numbers to use healthcare resources effectively.”
The algorithm and use of population-based healthcare administrative datasets developed to update the estimates for multiple sclerosis might provide a solution. A national surveillance system is important, too, Wallin said.
“Our goal is to come with an efficient, cost-effective way to monitor disease that could be done every 10 years,” he added. “That will help us understand who’s getting the disease, improve treatment, track incidence and prevalence, and try to prevent it.”
- Wallin MT, Culpepper WJ, Campbell JD, Nelson LM, et. Al. US Multiple Sclerosis Prevalence Workgroup. The prevalence of MS in the United States: A population-based estimate using health claims data.Neurology. 2019 Mar 5;92(10):e1029-e1040. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000007035. Epub 2019 Feb 15. PubMed PMID: 30770430; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6442006.
- GBD 2016 Neurology Collaborators. Global, regional, and national burden of neurological disorders, 1990-2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. Lancet Neurol. 2019 May;18(5):459-480. doi: 10.1016/S1474-4422(18)30499-X. Epub 2019 Mar 14. PubMed PMID: 30879893; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6459001.