Continuum Audio April 2026 Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders Issue With Dr. Andrew J. Solomon
In this episode, Lyell K. Jones Jr, MD, FAAN, speaks with Andrew J. Solomon, MD, FAAN, who served as the guest editor of the April 2026 Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders issue. They provide a preview of the issue, which publishes on April 2, 2026.
Dr. Jones is the editor-in-chief of Continuum: Lifelong Learning in Neurology® and is a professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Dr. Solomon is the Division Chief of Multiple Sclerosis and a Professor in the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont.
Additional Resources
Read the issue: continuum.aan.com
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Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud
More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com
Social Media
Host: @LyellJ
Full episode transcript available here
Dr Jones: It's been more than 150 years since Jean-Martin Charcot first described the disease that we now know as multiple sclerosis. Since then, the tools we have to diagnose and treat this disorder have expanded enormously. So why are the diagnostic criteria for MS. still evolving? Today we're speaking with Dr Andrew Solomon, guest editor of our latest issue of Continuum on MS and related disorders. To learn more about this question and much more.
Dr Jones: This is Dr Lyell Jones, editor in chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about subscribing to the journal, listening to verbatim recordings of the articles, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast.
Dr Jones: This is Dr Lyell Jones, editor in chief of Continuum, Lifelong Learning in Neurology. Today I'm interviewing Dr Andrew Solomon, who is Continuums guest editor for our latest issue of Continuum on multiple sclerosis and related disorders. Dr Solomon is a professor of neurological sciences at the University of Vermont, where he also serves as the division chief of multiple sclerosis. Dr Solomon is an internationally recognized authority on MS, particularly on the diagnostic approach to this complex disorder. Dr Solomon, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Dr Solomon: Hi, everyone. This is Andy Solomon. It's a pleasure to be here with you. And I feel honored to have helped this collaborative effort that created this important tool for trainees and clinicians in practice, the Continuum issue on multiple sclerosis and related disorders.
Dr Jones: Obviously, we're grateful that you've taken us on. A lot has happened in the world of MS and other neuroinflammatory disorders in the last few years, so lots to update. But as we've done over the last few podcasts, I'm going to start off the interview today, Dr Solomon, with a trivia question. And then we'll come back at the end of the podcast and give the answer. So, the trivia question is this. There are now more than 20 drugs approved by the FDA for the treatment of MS. What was the first disease-modifying therapy approved for MS? And when was it approved? So, don't answer because I know you know the answer. But we'll come back to it at the end of the interview. And our listeners can think about that question. So, let's get right to it. As many of our listeners know, the diagnostic criteria for MS. were recently revised. And you were involved with that revision. So, you're the perfect person to ask what were the major changes in the 2024 McDonald criteria, and why did we need to update them in the first place?
Dr Solomon: I'm very excited about the 2024 McDonald criteria, and it was an honor to be part of that process that resulted in that manuscript. When we revise the diagnostic criteria for MS usually it's driven by accumulating data that suggests some changes or revisions might help us diagnose patients either earlier or with more accuracy. And that's certainly the case with this criteria. There was accumulating data that suggested some particular changes were important. You know, there's a lot of expert opinion involved as well. You know, there's many experts who are involved in the collaborative decisions that go into these revisions. And some of the changes in our field also pushed some of the revisions to where maybe there's not as much evidence, but where we felt it would improve care for patients with MS. This criteria, I would argue, is probably one of the most substantial revisions in over 20 years. There's multiple changes that are potentially impactful for the diagnosis of MS. Some very important changes involve the incorporation of new paraclinical tools that we can use to assess the visual pathway, as well as, imaging tools that provide high specificity for MS that we can use to substitute or dissemination in time, for instance, as well as other tools that may allow us to diagnose patients earlier than we would have in prior criteria. There's also some opportunities with the new criteria to potentially provide access in regions where some tools are more available than others. For instance, the incorporation of Kappa Free Light Chains as a substitute for oligoclonal bands may open up opportunities in regions where expertise for oligoclonal band testing are not available. That's a very qualitative test, whereas Kappa Free Light Chain index is more quantitative, less expensive and may allow CSF testing to be performed to aid the diagnosis of MS in some regions where it wasn't available previously. This criteria provides multiple pathways to the diagnosis of MS, many more than we've had in prior criteria. So, it's important to emphasize that while there's all these new tools and changes that have been incorporated, not every pathway needs to be available where you practice. What it incorporates as flexibility. It is a bit more complex looking at all of these different possibilities, but the point is this flexibility allows clinicians or providers to diagnose MS early with high accuracy based on the tools they have available.
Dr Jones: I think it will be a learning curve, right? I think any time we make a change in how clinicians get accustomed to approaching a diagnosis of a disorder, it will take some time for folks to incorporate it. And I see what you mean about the complexity, but I think that's a really great point, that emphasizing the different pathways to the diagnosis is really a strength of the revision, right?
Dr Solomon: I agree, I think, you know, in other disorders, particularly if you think about rheumatologic disorders, systemic rheumatologic disorders or inflammatory disorders, where over time we've not had very highly specific and sensitive biomarkers. And we've incorporated a variety of clinical and prior clinical findings, testing, laboratory testing and biopsy and other things to confirm a diagnosis. These approaches to these disorders are sort of a checklist. And I think that clinicians became familiar with that approach and were able to make diagnoses accurately this way. And I think of the new criteria in a similar way. It's not quite amenable to a checklist, but the pathways are sort of simplified with multiple options. Hopefully, using the figures, clinicians can look at the paper and see what tools they have available to help them confirm a diagnosis of MS. I think it's really important to emphasize that the diagnostic criteria for MS still does not discriminate MS from other disorders. Everyone who's listening here, you do, the clinicians do. So, to enter the diagnostic criteria and these pathways, we first have to feel confident that the patient has a clinical presentation and an MRI presentation or MRI findings that are highly suggestive of MS. That aspect of the criteria hasn't changed since, the Schumacher criteria in the 1960s. This concept of no better explanation. So, we still need to know what's typical for MS. And we need to know what signs or symptoms or findings are that might suggest another disorder, because the criteria are really only validated and tested in patients who have these presentations to start with that are typical for MS. A major change in this particular criteria is that we can now diagnose patients who are asymptomatic. Previously just called radiological isolated syndrome. Not every patient with an MRI finding concerning for MS and now being diagnosed with MS. There's other features that, must be present, but even more than before, knowing what the typical appearance of MRI lesions suggestive of MS, it is even more critical now than it was before, because in those patients who have either no symptoms or a nonspecific presentation, if we have an MRI that's highly convincing for MS and some other prior clinical findings, we can make the diagnosis. But we first need to know with some confidence what that MRI should look like.
Dr Jones: So, there is a little circularity when we do these diagnostic criteria. I think our listeners who see patients will be reassured that the clinician is still in the loop. We haven't been automated out of the process yet.
Dr Solomon: We need a highly sensitive and specific biomarker or a set of biomarkers for MS. We're getting closer with some of these advanced imaging findings like central vein sign and paramagnetic rim lesions. But not every patient can be diagnosed with those. And they're not required for the diagnostic criteria. In lieu of a highly sensitive and specific test. Our clinical acumen, for what we find a neurologic exam. And what we see on imaging in particular, is quite critical for ensuring that the criteria perform as well as we hope they will.
Dr Jones: So, you've had the opportunity, the vantage point, to review all of these articles covering a wide variety of topics, MS, other neuroinflammatory disorders like aquaporin‑4–positive neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD), myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disease, MOGAD. Anything that surprised you in these articles as you were reading through them?
Dr Solomon: I think maybe for listeners, what may be surprising to some of them is that despite guidelines surrounding the use of some of our disease modifying therapies in pregnancy and breastfeeding that are published by regulatory authorities in the United States or Europe or other places, we are making other decisions for patients based on the data we have, the best data we have. Thinking about family planning is really important for us with patients who are newly diagnosed with MS, as well as through the course of their disease. This is a conversation we should be having shortly after diagnosis, because there are strategies we can take to minimize the risk of exposure of DMT around conception and to make plans for how we're going to think about DMT surrounding breastfeeding, to ensure the health of mom and the baby, and reduce risks as much as we can with the knowledge we have. I think in medicine it's quite common for us to use medications off label, right? I mean, so medications are often FDA approved for one indication. And in neurology, for instance, we find a lot of medications after their approval were quite effective for migraine prophylaxis for instance. Right? And so, it's not unusual for us to prescribe medications beyond the label. And I'm not suggesting that we necessarily ignore the advice of our regulatory authorities. But sometimes the data is accumulating really fast around some of these therapies after they're approved. Sometimes we can look towards experts and how we can navigate pregnancy and breastfeeding in MS.
Dr Jones: I think that's a great point about the importance of family planning and having to use judgment. I do want to highlight to our listeners and our subscribers a fantastic article in the issue on family planning and MS and other neuroinflammatory disorders. This was written by Dr Ruth Dobson and Dr Kersten Hellwig, and I think it covers a lot of that gray area where we have to use our clinical judgment to manage these diseases in the absence of a regulatory approval. And I think, again, that's an important gap that the issue fills. And really, that's just a wonderfully written article that I think is a must-read. So, we cover lots of topics in this issue. And one of them is again a relatively newly characterized disorder, MOGAD. What's the latest in the world of MOGAD, what should our listeners be aware of?
Dr Solomon: I agree, I think we're in an exciting time in CNS inflammatory disease. And this is a recently described disorder. You know, and the diagnostic criteria now is only a few years old. So, I think importantly, readers should be aware of the diagnostic criteria. This is something that, really will help us distinguish this disorder from NO spectrum disorder and MS. There's a key overlap between the MS diagnostic criteria and MOGAD. Two decades ago we saw a pediatric MS included somewhat atypical presentations like bilateral optic neuritis or acute disseminated encephalomyelitis. And we had caveats in our approaches to pediatric presentations of presumed MS, suggesting that there could be something very different than adult MS. Subsequently, we've realized that pediatric MS presents quite similarly to adult MS in terms of its clinical syndromes and MRI appearance, and many of those pediatric patients who had initially been diagnosed with MS and MOGAD. MOGAD is actually probably more common demyelinating syndrome in patients who are under 12 years old. So, the MS diagnostic criteria requires testing for MOG-IgG with a good assay, a cell-based assay, any patient being evaluated under the age of 12 or with a demyelinating syndrome to avoid misdiagnosis.
Dr Jones: Thanks for that. Obviously, MOGAD is one of several disorders that have been more recently characterized and, something that our readers need to be familiar with, and there's plenty of updates within the issue on that and other topics. Okay. So now back to our Continuum audio trivia question. And just to remind our listeners, there are now more than 20 drugs approved by the FDA for the treatment of MS. What was the first disease-modifying therapy approved for MS? And when was it approved? Dr Solomon, do you want to take the honors and answer the question?
Dr Solomon: Sure. It was way back in 1993. You had to get on a wait list, I believe, initially to get on it. There was some sort of lottery, and it was Betaseron.
Dr Jones: Betaseron in 1993, was the first disease-modifying therapy approved by the FDA for the treatment of MS. It just shows how much water under the bridge we've had since then. 1993 was also the first year of the Jurassic Park series of movies. It was the biggest movie of the year, the song of the year in 1993 was "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston. It was also the year you can tell that I look back into 1993 to see what else happened. It was also the first year the World Wide Web became publicly available, which is it kind of puts brackets on the era or the epoch of MS disease modifying therapy. And finally, the Super Bowl champs that year were the Dallas Cowboys, who unfortunately, have not had much luck in Super Bowls since the 1990s. Maybe they will have more opportunities like we've seen with MS therapeutics. So, Dr Solomon, I want to thank you for joining us today. I want to thank you for such a wonderful discussion of the latest in MS. I think the updated diagnostic criteria are really going to be critical for our listeners to understand and incorporate into their practice. Really grateful for your leadership of the issue, putting together a really stellar group of experts for all of our articles and grateful for your time today. Thank you for joining us.
Dr Solomon: Thanks so much for having me. Thank all the other listeners out there for joining us as well. I'm really excited about this issue of Continuum.
Dr Jones: Again, we've been speaking with Dr Andrew Solomon, guest editor of Continuums most recent issue on multiple sclerosis and related disorders. Please check it out. And thank you to our listeners for joining today.
Dr Monteith: This is Dr Teshamae Monteith, associate editor of Continuum Audio. If you've enjoyed this episode, you'll love the Journal, which is full of in-depth and clinically relevant information important for neurology practitioners. Use the link in the episode notes to learn more and subscribe. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio.