@article{Sloka_2020, place={Montreal, Canada}, title={The Epidemiology Study in Multiple Sclerosis - Relevance to Natural History}, volume={7}, url={https://mjm.mcgill.ca/article/view/634}, DOI={10.26443/mjm.v7i1.634}, abstractNote={<p>Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, demyelinating disease of the central nervous system white matter that has been extensively studied using the epidemiological approach, and yet an etiology for the disease remains elusive. This paper presents a review of past publications that have made suggestions toward the design of epidemiological studies in MS. A formal search strategy is described, and a short summary of these papers is provided. A natural history of MS based on previous studies is proposed as a framework for describing future directions in the neuroepidemiology of the disease, and categorization based on the clinical forms of MS is described. Within the context of a proposed natural history, suggestions are made on the use of sub-regionalization in cluster studies across different domains, as well as on the use of specific reference points in a patient’s lifetime in the analysis of clusters.</p>}, number={1}, journal={McGill Journal of Medicine}, author={Sloka, Jeffrey}, year={2020}, month={Dec.} }