Behnaz Sedighi, Mohamad Ali Shafa, Zohreh Abna, Amir Khosrou Ghaseminejad, Reza Farahat, Nozar Nakhaee and Baharnaz Hassani
Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting myelinated axons. Cognitive impairments have been observed in patients with MS. Although there are some methods to examine the progress of MS, a tool hasn’t been developed to fully correlate MS symptoms with cognitive deficits.
Methods: Among patients referring to Kerman-Iran Shafa Hospital, 60 MS patients were chosen to be included in the study. Their demographic data was obtained and patients filled the Brief International Cognitive Assessment for MS (BICAMS) questionnaire and then underwent OCT. The Chi-square test was used to analyze the frequency of patients with normal and abnormal OCT in the impaired and unimpaired cognition groups. P<0.05 was considered as statistically significant.
Results: 20 % of the patients with cognitive impairments had normal OCT, while 71.4% who were cognitively healthy had normal OCT. the difference between the two groups was statistically significant (p<0.001). 20% of patients with impaired cognition had physical disabilities, while only 2.9% with normal cognition had physical disabilities, the statistical difference between these two groups was also statistically significant (p=0.029).
Conclusions: Results of our study indicates that OCT can be used as a screening tool to evaluate the cognitive status of MS patients with 66.6% and 83.3%sensitivity and specificity, respectively.