By Serena Gordon HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 26 (HealthDay News) -- An experimental screening technique finds that multiple sclerosis patients have two different molecular "signatures" that reflect disease severity.

This suggests that doctors might one day use this tool to help determine who has a more aggressive form of MS and might need earlier treatment with stronger medications, researchers report.

"This study shows there is evidence that we can begin to identify subsets of MS patients, and that we're moving ever-so-slowly to personalizing MS care," said study author Dr. Philip De Jager, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an associate neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

But this screening tool "is not ready for the clinic at this point. It needs to be validated in another trial," De Jager said. He envisions that this test would be one component of a number of tests doctors could use to generate risk estimates.

Results of the study are published in the Sept. 26 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

About 400,000 Americans have MS, a chronic, sometimes disabling disease that affects the central nervous system. The central nervous system includes the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. MS symptoms may include fatigue, numbness in the limbs, balance and coordination problems, bladder or bowel dysfunction, vision problems, pain, and even paralysis.

A few treatment options exist for one type of the disease, but no single therapy helps everyone with MS, and there is no cure.

The four types of MS include relapsing-remitting, primary progressive, secondary progressive and progressive-relapsing, the MS society says. About 85 percent of people with MS have the relapsing-remitting form of the disease, and the available treatments are for this form of the disease.

It's often difficult to diagnose MS, and it can take even longer to figure out which type someone has. In addition, doctors have no way to predict which patients will respond to a particular drug.

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Screening Tool Reveals Two Multiple Sclerosis Types