Advancing Pediatric MS Care: Insights from AAN 2026

Announcer:
You’re listening to NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Elizabeth Wilson, who’s the Director of the Multiple Sclerosis and Neuroimmunology Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. She’ll be sharing insights from the 2026 American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting and implications for the future of pediatric multiple sclerosis care. Here’s Dr. Wilson now.

Dr. Wilson:

I always love going to AAN. I think that there's tons of great information being presented. I tend to go to the talks on adult MS because that's where we tend to see what's up and coming, and then oftentimes, what's being presented in the adult world will eventually trickle down to the pediatric world. It's nice to see what is coming out and what we should be looking out for with our pediatric patients.

Then, I really like going to the neuro-ophthalmology lectures because we work very closely with our neuro-ophthalmologists to monitor our kids with MS. We’re just getting a better sense of what it is that they're monitoring and looking for on their exams, or what kind of measurements we can be looking for, so that we can better understand our multidisciplinary collaboration with them.

I think it's a really exciting time for kids with MS because there's a lot of clinical trials that are ongoing right now trying to get some more approval for the drugs that we use in adults in pediatrics. It might make it easier for kids to get access to those treatments, which I think is amazing.

And there's also a lot of work being done nationally and internationally trying to understand disease activity and progression. Lots of different groups are looking at biomarkers of disease activity and using advanced neuroimaging techniques to try to understand how we can best monitor these patients and then, ultimately, how we can intervene as early as possible to prevent disease progression. That is an effort that's happening with individual institutions, but also certainly at the national and international level. It's been amazing to see the work that's being presented at these conferences and just the amount of collaboration that's happening across different countries, and I think that's really important especially for a disease like pediatric MS that's so rare. We really need that international collaboration just to understand it better.

All of this is really in an effort to have the most precise treatment for each patient and being able to individualize medicine. So hopefully, at some point in the future, we'll be able to say, “You don't have pediatric MS alone, but this is how your disease is acting, and these are your biomarkers. We think that you're going to respond best to this treatment,” and we’ll have a more targeted approach for each patient.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Elizabeth Wilson talking about the future of multiple sclerosis in children. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!