The UK MS Register had been collecting data for six weeks from people with MS regarding their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is a concerning time for all everyone, and even more for those people with a pre-existing health condition.
A number of people with MS have received letters from the government asking them to shield as they are in the venerable category. People with MS are often on Disease Modifying Therapies (DMTs) which can affect their immune systems and make them even more vulnerable if they are infected with a virus.
Despite a number of global efforts to quantify this risk there are still a huge numbers of unknowns and nobody can give a definitive answer about whether having MS or being on a DMT will make you more likely to catch COVID-19 or if you do, whether you will be worse off.
Over 4100 people have responded to the MS Register initial (baseline) survey, 2000 of these people have gone on to answer a follow up survey. Two hundred people who have told us that they have a confirmed (by lab test or been told by a health care professional) or suspected case of coronavirus.
Initial analysis of our survey data is showing that people with MS, be they on a DMT or not, are not at any more risk of contracting the Coronavirus or of having a serious outcome, than the general population. The most likely explanation for this is because people with MS have been shielding or isolating themselves for longer. Even before the general UK lockdown came into effect.
There is still work to be done looking into more aspects of the responses and the overall results need to be viewed in the context of the amount of formal COVID testing that has been done in the general population. This is an encouraging early result, to a question that people with MS have been asking, so it’s important to communicate this – with all the caveats of an initial analysis in a dynamic situation.
A deeper analysis in now ongoing to look at these results with the intention of submitting a paper to a peer reviewed journal by the end of May.
By Katie Tuite-Dalton, Swansea University
Watch Video for Results from Survey and Related Twitter Posts
//://twitter.com/UKMSRegister/status/1256261882417217538
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UK MS Register is one of the nine Centres of Excellence based in Population Data Science at Swansea University Medical School.