Study Uses NIRS to Assess Hypoxia-Related Brain Function Impairment in Patients With MS

Ateyeh Soroush, a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary, explains her ongoing study, "Hypoxia-Related Impairment of Brain Function in Multiple Sclerosis (MS): Insights From Near-Infrared Spectroscopy," which investigates hypoxia-related brain function impairment in patients with MS. She also discusses the implications the findings have for understanding MS progression and developing related therapeutic approaches.

Soroush explained the study in further detail at the Americas Committee for Research and Treatment in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) Forum 2024 during the session titled "Emerging Concepts in MS."

Transcript

Why did you decide to investigate hypoxia-related brain function impairment in patients with MS?

It all started from previous studies in the current lab that I'm working at. They found that more than 40% of the people with MS are experiencing brain hypoxia, which is a significant population of the MS cohort. It is really important to control for that factor when we're studying other outcomes, cognitive brain function, or any other sorts of outcomes of MS, controlling for hypoxia.

What was the objective of your study?

We are aiming to study brain hypoxia in people with MS and investigate its associations with brain function, cognitive performance, and blood biomarker outcomes.

What methods did you use to explore this?

It is a 2-hour protocol when patients come in, and we also recruit healthy controls, so once the participant is in, they will go through the near-infrared spectroscopy protocol that is being done during resting state and non-rest tasks, such as motor activations and neurocognitive tests.

So far, what have been the main findings of your study?

So far, we have found that more than 40% of people with MS are experiencing brain hypoxia. This is positively associated with brain function, which is another metric we're using, and it is quantified by functional near-infrared spectroscopy. It's a non-invasive novel imaging technique to quantify brain hemodynamic activity and brain connectivity.

What implications do these findings have for understanding MS progression and developing therapeutic approaches for the condition?

As I stated, it's a significant percentage of people that are experiencing brain hypoxia, and it is very new, but we are able to quantify it with NIRS, or near-infrared spectroscopy. It is really important to control for this factor when investigating symptom management or treatment outcomes. There were some previous oxygen therapies in MS that reported failure in results just because they did not maybe control for such a factor. So, it is really important to control it as we're moving forward.