STOCKHOLM – Further, lesions missed by skipping gadolinium would have changed treatment course for just 1 of the 84 patients in the study, said Lucia Gentili, MD, a neurologist in the department of medicine, section of neurology, at the University of Perugia (Italy), in an interview at the annual congress of the European Committee on Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis.
Dr. Lucia Gentili
“Postcontrast MRI might not be mandatory to detect signs of disease activity in patients with active MS,” she observed.
The question of the long-term effects of gadolinium deposition from serial scans in patients with MS is a hot topic among both patients and those caring for people with MS, said Dr. Gentili, so she and her associates decided to see how avoiding gadolinium exposure would affect lesion detection and patient management among their patient population.
For the retrospective study, the investigators looked at the records of 84 patients with relapsing remitting MS at two Italian MS centers over a 5-year time span. This was a cohort enriched for patients with highly active disease, said Dr. Gentili. A total of 45 patients, or over half of the cohort, had experienced at least one relapse in the preceding year.
The study included patients who were being screened for a second-line treatment and had evidence of brain or spinal cord contrast-enhancing lesions on MRI, if they also had a previous MRI of the brain and spinal cord performed on the same scanner.
The uniform protocol used for all MRIs included axial T2-weighted, fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), and pre- and postcontrast T1-weighted sequences.
In all, the reference MRI scans picked up 164 contrast-enhancing lesions; of these, 151 (92.1%) were also seen on the T2/FLAIR sequences, showing up as new or enlarging lesions. Thirteen lesions were not visible on T2/FLAIR sequences when compared with the previous MRI, said Dr. Gentili.
Almost all patients in the cohort – a group with highly active disease, Dr. Gentili emphasized – also had new or enlarging lesions visible in T2 sequences. “Only two patients with MRI evidence of contrast-enhancing lesions showed no new or enlarged lesions in T2/FLAIR images,” she added. “Therefore, without gadolinium administration, only two patients in our cohort would have been incorrectly classified as radiologically stable.”
In reality, though, one of the two subjects whose disease activity was missed without gadolinium contrast had a relapse in the preceding 12 months, so clinical evidence of disease activity prompted attention to this individual. “Thus, only one subject in the entire cohort would have been incorrectly classified as stable,” Dr. Gentili and coauthors reported.
The results of this small study do not represent a case for abandoning gadolinium, Dr. Gentili stressed. “In our study, active lesions detected only by gadolinium enhancement, that is, without any evidence of new or enlarged lesions on T2/FLAIR, occurred in a limited but significant portion of contrast-enhancing lesions,” occurring in about 8% of the total lesions.
Rather, this study and other ongoing work represents a basis for shared decision making between persons with MS and those caring for them. Particularly for patients with highly active MS who can anticipate receiving a high burden of contrast to track disease activity, physicians can consider presenting them with the option to omit gadolinium contrast, she said.
Dr. Gentili reported receiving a travel grant from the ECTRIMS scientific program committee, and several coauthors reported relationships with multiple pharmaceutical companies. One coauthor received research funding from the Italian Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Italian Ministry of health, and the Italian Ministry of Education.
SOURCE: Gentili L et al. ECTRIMS 2019, Abstract P901.