Therapeutic trials in multiple sclerosis.

Several recently completed clinical trials are reported to demonstrate beneficial treatment with immunosuppressive therapy in multiple sclerosis (MS). The enthusiasm generated by these reports may motivate investigators to further such trials even in the face of the appreciable expense, time and risk involved. Of at least equal concern, clinicians are proceeding to treat individual MS patients without adequate evaluation of the claims. Critical appraisals of available data and proposals for future therapeutic endeavors therefore seem in order and are made in this paper

Visual Impairment and quality of life in the Older European Population, the EUREYE study

Purpose: To determine the prevalence of visual impairment (VI) in populations 65 year or older from six European countries and describe the association with vision-related quality of life. VI was defined according to WHO as best corrected visual acuity 0,48 (World Health Organization (1992): International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th revised ed. Vol 1. Geneva). Methods: 4166 participants in The European Eye study, 65 years and older selected randomly from the general census in the participating centres, were interviewed for vision-related quality of life and underwent an eye exam including distance visual acuity, refraction and fundus photography. Results: The prevalence of VI rose with increasing age and more so in women. There was a pattern of a higher prevalence of VI in the Mediterranean countries compared to Northern European countries with the exception of Tallinn (Estonia) which had higher VI prevalence rates than the other north European centres. The prevalence of low vision was 3% or less in all centres. Blindness prevalence varied from 2% to less than half a per cent. Vision-related quality of life was strongly associated with visual acuity and the presence of bilateral age-related macular degeneration. Conclusion: The prevalence of visual impairment in the examined ageing European populations shows a definite increasing trend from north to south

DNA-based eye colour prediction across Europe with the IrisPlex system

The ability to predict Externally Visible Characteristics (EVCs) from DNA, also referred to as Forensic DNA Phenotyping (FDP), is an exciting new chapter in forensic genetics holding great promise for tracing unknown individuals who are unidentifiable via standard forensic short tandem repeat (STR) profiling. For the purpose of DNA-based eye colour prediction, we previously developed the IrisPlex system consisting of a multiplex genotyping assay and a prediction model based on genotype and phenotype data from 3804 Dutch Europeans. Recently, we performed a forensic developmental validation study of the highly sensitive IrisPlex assay, which currently represents the only validated tool available for DNA-based prediction of eye colour in forensic applications. In the present study, we validate the IrisPlex prediction model by extending our initially described model towards genotype and phenotype data from multiple European populations. We performed IrisPlex analysis on 3840 individuals from seven sites across Europe as part of the European Eye (EUREYE) study for which DNA and high-resolution eye images were available. The accuracy rate of correctly predicting an individual's eye colour as being blue or brown, above the empirically established probability threshold of 0.7, was on average 94% across all seven European populations, ranging from 91% to 98%, despite the large variation in eye colour frequencies between the populations. The overall prediction accuracies expressed by the area under the receiver characteristic operating curves (AUC) were 0.96 for blue and 0.96 for brown eyes, which is considerably higher than those established before. The IrisPlex prediction model parameters generated from this multi-population European dataset, and thus its prediction capabilities, were highly comparable to those previously established. Therefore, the increased information regarding eye colour phenotype and genotype distributions across Europe, and the system's ability to provide eye colour predictions across Europe accurately, both highlight additional evidence for the utility of the IrisPlex system in forensic casework. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved