Detection of clinical relapses in multiple sclerosis cohorts: construction and validation of a model based on administrative data.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the main cause of chronic disability in young people during their most productive years of life and therefore carries a high social and economic burden. The present study aimed to: (1) verify the capacity of an administrative data source to furnish data for constructing a model able to detect the occurrence of clinical relapses in MS patients and (2) validate the constructed theoretical model on a set of real-world data. Two MS experts identified some administrative variables as proxies of clinical relapses.