Editorial - Volume 18, Issue 2 - March 2016

We are proud to offer, for the first time, continuing education (CE) credits for physicians and other health-care providers, in relation to one of the articles published in this issue of the IJMSC. This new initiative is the result of a collaborative effort between the authors, our editorial team, the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers (CMSC), and our publisher, Delaware Media Group. We plan to continue offering CE credits to our readers on a regular basis, as another means of fulfilling the journal's educational mission. We look forward to reading your comments about this project via email or on social media. You will also have an opportunity to interact with us in person at the upcoming CMSC annual meeting in the Washington, DC, area during the IJMSC roundtable offered on Thursday, June 2, from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m., or any time at the IJMSC booth in the exhibit hall.

Several articles in this issue provide new evidence pertaining to fatigue, one of the most frequent and disabling, yet “invisible,” symptoms of MS. Fiest and colleagues found that depression and other comorbidities are associated with the presence of fatigue. For Garg and colleagues, fatigue is associated with depression, impairments in functional mobility, and reduced quality of life. While definitive cause-and-effect relationships were not established, these findings underscore the need to routinely assess fatigue as part of the comprehensive management of MS.

Outcome measurement is increasingly important in this era of value-based care, but the usefulness of the data depends on the validity and reliability of the measurement tools, and on a rigorous development process for new measures. Two articles in this issue report on the reliability of measures of body function, including sensation for Uszynski and colleagues, and balance for Wajda and colleagues. Kuspinar and colleagues describe the first steps of development of a new bilingual preference-based measure for MS, the Preference-Based Multiple Sclerosis Index, via qualitative methods.

While they highly value the education provided by their care team, people with MS and their families increasingly rely on social media to gather and share information about medical conditions and treatments. The article from Ghahari and Forwell provides an illustration of this phenomenon, and suggests that this mode of communication could be used more often by health-care providers.

Social stigma is frequently associated with chronic conditions and disability, and can negatively affect emotions and lead to isolation, when individuals are in greater need of support. Cook and colleagues observed that isolation stigma and concealment are reported by individuals with MS and various levels of disability, demonstrating the need for further research on how to best identify and address these issues.

Let yourself be carried by Spring fever, and keep on reading.