Relapses in Patients Treated with High-Dose Biotin for Progressive Multiple Sclerosis

High-dose biotin (HDB) is a therapy used in non-active progressive multiple sclerosis (PMS). Several reports have suggested that HDB treatment may be associated with an increased risk of relapse. We aimed to determine whether HDB increases the risk of clinical relapse in PMS and describe the characteristics of the patients who experience it. We conducted a French, multicenter, retrospective study, comparing a group of PMS patients treated with HDB to a matched control group. Poisson regression was applied to model the specific statistical distribution of the annualized relapse rate (ARR). A propensity score (PS), based on the inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW), was used to adjust for indication bias and included the following variables: gender, primary PMS or not, age, EDSS, time since the last relapse, and co-prescription of a DMT. Two thousand six hundred twenty-eight patients treated with HDB and 654 controls were analyzed with a follow-up of 17 ± 8 months. Among them, 148 validated relapses were observed in the group treated with biotin and 38 in the control group (p = 0.62). After adjustment based on the PS, the ARR was 0.044 ± 0.23 for the biotin-treated group and 0.028 ± 0.16 for the control group (p = 0.18). The more relapses there were before biotin, the higher the risk of relapse during treatment, independently from the use of HDB. While the number of relapses reported for patients with no previous inflammatory activity receiving biotin has gradually increased, the present retrospective study is adequately powered to exclude an elevated risk of relapse for patients with PMS treated with HDB.Observatoire Français de la Sclérose en Plaque

DMTs and Covid-19 severity in MS: a pooled analysis from Italy and France

We evaluated the effect of DMTs on Covid-19 severity in patients with MS, with a pooled-analysis of two large cohorts from Italy and France. The association of baseline characteristics and DMTs with Covid-19 severity was assessed by multivariate ordinal-logistic models and pooled by a fixed-effect meta-analysis. 1066 patients with MS from Italy and 721 from France were included. In the multivariate model, anti-CD20 therapies were significantly associated (OR = 2.05, 95%CI = 1.39–3.02, p < 0.001) with Covid-19 severity, whereas interferon indicated a decreased risk (OR = 0.42, 95%CI = 0.18–0.99, p = 0.047). This pooled-analysis confirms an increased risk of severe Covid-19 in patients on anti-CD20 therapies and supports the protective role of interferon

Notice explicative Carte géol. France (1/50 000), feuille Argelès-sur-Mer – Cerbère (1097). Orléans : BRGM, 189 p. Carte géologique par Calvet M., Autran A., Wiazemsky M., Laumonier B., Guitard G. (✝) (2014).

Notice de la Carte géologique de Franc

Neurofascin is a glial receptor for the caspr/paranodin-contactin axonal complex at the axoglial junction

AbstractIn myelinated fibers of the vertebrate nervous system, glial-ensheathing cells interact with axons at specialized adhesive junctions, the paranodal septate-like junctions [1]. The axonal proteins paranodin/Caspr and contactin form a cis complex in the axolemma at the axoglial adhesion zone, and both are required to stabilize the junction [2, 3]. There has been intense speculation that an oligodendroglial isoform of the cell adhesion molecule neurofascin, NF155, expressed at the paranodal loop [4, 5] might be the glial receptor for the paranodin/Caspr-contactin complex, particularly since paranodin/Caspr and NF155 colocalize to ectopic sites in the CNS of the dysmyelinated mouse Shiverer mutant [5]. We report that the extracellular domain of NF155 binds specifically to transfected cells expressing the paranodin/Caspr-contactin complex at the cell surface. This region of NF155 also binds the paranodin/Caspr-contactin complex from brain lysates in vitro. In support of the functional significance of this interaction, NF155 antibodies and the extracellular domain of NF155 inhibit myelination in myelinating cocultures, presumably by blocking the adhesive relationship between the axon and glial cell. These results demonstrate that the paranodin/Caspr-contactin complex interacts biochemically with NF155 and that this interaction is likely to be biologically relevant at the axoglial junction

Carte géol. France (1/50 000), feuille Sotta-Bonifacio-Santa-Teresa-di-Gallura (1127). Orléans : BRGM. Notice explicative

Carte géol. France (1/50 000), feuille Sotta-Bonifacio-Santa-Teresa-di-Gallura (1127). Orléans : BRGM. Notice explicativ

Septic arthritis screening with a fast diagnostic tool using MID infrared spectroscopy: a multi-centric study

International audienc