Projects in the COMBAT-MS frame work
The picture depicts the initial phase of COMBAT-MS, which included several different projects leveraging data sourced from several different registries and databases.
COMBAT-MS "core" (red circle in the image) constituted a prospective (forward-looking) study in which we followed nearly 4,000 participating people with MS during the years 2017 to 2022. The study was conducted at all seven university clinics in Sweden and comprised several different scales for disease impact, including patient-reported measures, were collected at least annually. In addition, blood samples and results from magnetic resonance imaging were collected. Most of the data was collected in the Swedish MS register, which is part of the Swedish Neurology Register.
The study also contained a purely register linkage-based part (yellow circle in the picture), where all people with relapsing MS who started a DMT from 2011 to 2018, an estimated 6000 patients, were included.
In an extended part, several pharmaco-epidemiological studies were carried out (the blue and black circles in the picture) in which all people with MS who had approved participation in the Swedish MS register could potentially be included.
Finally, several studies were also conducted based on medical data available at Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC). KPSC is a health care organization that serves several million residents with health care services in Southern California (orange circle in the picture). This includes nearly 4,000 people with MS.
The current phase of the project means that we continue to follow this large group of people with MS and strive to include additional data sources in order to describe the course of the disease in more detail and better understand how disease mechanisms develop over time.
This means that we will be able to integrate AI-based image analysis of MRI scans of the brain, soluble biomarkers in blood, genetic information and health data from various registries. The basis for this is the COMBAT-MS study and the clinical and patient-reported measures of disease impact that anchor the data in a clinical context.