Characteristics of COVID-19 disease in multiple sclerosis patients

Abstract

We read the study by Safavi et al. (2020) in a recent issue of Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders with great interest. They reported a cross-sectional study among multiple sclerosis (MS) patients to identify suspected COVID-19 cases and the factors associated with it. They suggested that most MS patients have a mild course of CVID-19 infection. The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is in the pandemic stage with significant concerns for individuals with an underlying health-related condition (Richardson et al., 2020). Multiple sclerosis (MS) patients on immunosuppressive/immunomodulatory disease modifying therapies (DMT) are generally at increased risk of infections raising concern related to different risk or outcome in case of infection with COVID-19. It is still uncertain, however, whether immunosuppressive agents increase or decrease the severity of COVID-19 infection in MS patients (Ritchie and Singanayagam, 2020). So, we designed this study to assess characteristics and outcome of COVID-19 disease in our MS patients.