Proceedings of the 25th BCTRIMS Annual Meeting

Introduction: The multiple sclerosis treatment aims to reduce the demyelinating action with the usage of immunomodulators (DMD). However, few available treatments had their remyelinating performanceexamined, having in mine that the conventional neuroimaging methods fail to detect the remyelination.Objectives: q-Space Myelin Map (qMM), to measure comparatively the remyelinating activity in patientstreated in MS patients, and we aim to correlate remyelination with clinical improvement.Methods: For this, we outlined an observational study, which aims to analyze neuroimage biomarkers in 27 patients using DMDs, with an average age of 31.88 ±7.18 years, 68.6% women and 81.3% of white ethnicity.In this preliminary analysis 27 patients performed 2 visits (month 0, 6) with neurological evaluation.Remyelination was evaluated in Magnetic Resonance Imaging by qMM through the result of normalizedleptocurtic diffusion (NLD) as a proxy for myelin content.Results: We evaluated the ΔNLD in six months and its association with clinical scales in the period. The lesional ΔNLD correlated positively with the change in the Multiple Sclerosis Quality of Life-54 (MSQOL-54) questionnaire (r = 0.23; p = 0.03 in the mental health compound and r = 0.44; p = 0.04 in the physical healthcompound) and in the Timed 25-foot walked (T25W), (r = 0.55 ; p < 0.01 ). We also evaluated the variationof NLD in normal appearing white matter (ΔNAWM), which was associated with favorable evolution in T25W (r = 55.2 ; p = 0.01). This was the first study with qMM that evaluated the quantitative evolution between lesional NLD changes and clinical improvement of MS.Conclusion: According to our hypothesis, an increase in NLD in 6 months (reflecting remyelinating activity)was associated with clinical improvement, especially with subjective quality of life and function of the lowerlimbs.