Genetics

This post covers Villoslada and colleagues' 2017 study in Neurology: Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation, which used two Spanish MS cohorts, one with serum sampled every three months for two years, to look for metabolomic markers of disease severity. It reports the sphingomyelin and lysophosphatidylethanolamine signature and its overlap with interferon-beta use, separates the three severity models by their actual predictive ability, walks through the metabolites that survived both cohorts, uses cortisol's sensitivity and specificity to show what the numbers mean clinically, and closes on the cross-cohort classifier validation the authors planned but could not run.