Prediction of acute multiple sclerosis relapses by transcription levels of peripheral blood cells.

Background: The ability to predict the spatial frequency of relapses in multiple sclerosis (MS) would enable physicians to decide when to intervene more aggressively and to plan clinical trials more accurately.

Methods: In the current study our objective was to determine if subsets of genes can predict the time to the next acute relapse in patients with MS. Data-mining and predictive modeling tools were utilized to analyze a gene-expression dataset of 94 non-treated patients; 62 patients with definite MS and 32 patients with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS).