Updates in MS Care: Key Topics at AAN 2026

Announcer:
You’re listening to NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Aaron Miller will share multiple sclerosis topics covered at the 2026 American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting. He’s the Medical Director of the Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis and a Professor of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Here’s Dr. Miller now.

Dr. Miller:
I always look forward to the AAN annual meeting for a number of reasons, but as an MS specialist and primarily a clinician, I'm always interested in the latest diagnostic and therapeutic bits of information that come out of the meeting.

During the annual meeting, I will be giving, for the second year in a row, along with Dr. Jiwon Oh from Toronto and Dr. Laura Balcer from NYU, an update on the revised 2024 McDonald criteria for the diagnosis of MS. I'll be highlighting some areas of potential misdiagnosis, and one of the things that I'll be adding this year is a brief discussion of the so far limited real-world experience with the McDonald criteria. Since the criteria were developed in 2024 and not actually published until late 2025, many neurologists around the country and the world are not yet familiar or comfortable using these criteria. So, I will be reviewing what the new criteria are, what the changes are from the 2017 criteria, and what impact they've had so far.

I'm always interested in clinical therapeutics. I suspect at AAN we may see the reprise of some of the material that was presented at ECTRIMS or perhaps ACTRIMS in the therapeutic realm. So, for example, at the recent MS meeting in San Diego, we heard the results of the PERSEUS trial of tolebrutinib in primary progressive MS, which unfortunately had a negative outcome, unlike the tolebrutinib trial in secondary progressive MS, which had a positive clinical outcome.

So, I'm sure we're going to see more things about tolebrutinib and other BTK inhibitors. At the ACTRIMS meeting, for example, we heard the results of the fenebrutinib versus ocrelizumab trial in primary progressive MS, and that was a non-inferiority trial that showed the BTK inhibitor fenebrutinib was not inferior to ocrelizumab. At the same time that trial was running, two trials of fenebrutinib in relapsing-remitting MS were being run simultaneously. We've seen a press release of the results of one of those trials, which was reportedly positive, but we haven't yet seen the data from either of those trials. I eagerly anticipate that the results of those phase three, simultaneously run trials of fenebrutinib in relapsing-remitting MS will likely be presented at AAN.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Aaron Miller talking about multiple sclerosis updates at the 2026 American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD dot com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!