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Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Local Research on Multiple Sclerosis

by

HealthPlus Contributor
981 days ago
20220530
Dr. Henry Bailey

Dr. Henry Bailey

A study of Mul­ti­ple Scle­ro­sis(MS) in Trinidad and To­ba­go is cur­rent­ly on­go­ing at the Cen­tre for Health Eco­nom­ics at UWI. The study aims to un­der­stand the qual­i­ty of life of MS Pa­tients in Trinidad and To­ba­go us­ing new de­vel­op­ments in health out­comes re­search, a field that com­bines med­i­cine and eco­nom­ics and spe­cial­izes in mea­sur­ing and un­der­stand­ing health. This study has re­ceived per­ti­nent ap­provals from UWI and the Min­istry of Health.

With the sup­port of our clin­i­cal re­search part­ner Dr. Avidesh Pan­day, Neu­rol­o­gist at NCRHA, pa­tients are com­plet­ing a ques­tion­naire that pro­vides in­sight in­to the ef­fect that MS has on their day to day life, and how they ac­cess health­care. The same ques­tion­naire is al­so be­ing com­plet­ed by a match­ing sam­ple of peo­ple who do not have MS. This will pro­vide a ref­er­ence group against which the re­sults from the MS group can be com­pared. Neu­rol­o­gists and care-givers are al­so be­ing in­ter­viewed.

This study will help health sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tors to un­der­stand the day-to-day chal­lenges that face MS pa­tients and to find new ways to help pa­tients.

While the study is still on­go­ing, some pre­lim­i­nary re­sults show that stress is a ma­jor trig­ger of MS symp­toms for MS pa­tients in Trinidad and To­ba­go. Pain in­ter­feres with nor­mal ac­tiv­i­ties much more for MS pa­tients than for the gen­er­al (non-MS) pop­u­la­tion. Gen­er­al­ly for T&T pa­tients, phys­i­cal health is more like­ly than emo­tion­al state to af­fect work per­for­mance among MS pa­tients. How­ev­er, MS pa­tients who have a sup­port­ive do­mes­tic en­vi­ron­ment al­so seem to have bet­ter health out­comes.

The study should be com­plet­ed by

Sep­tem­ber 2022.

Dr. Hen­ry Bai­ley PhD, is a lec­tur­er at the De­part­ment of Eco­nom­ics at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine. His pri­ma­ry re­search in­ter­ests are in the area of health out­comes mea­sure­ment and meth­ods of tech­nol­o­gy as­sess­ment in health­care for de­vel­op­ing coun­tries health sys­tems.


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