Week 2: Safaa Mouline

This week at the meeting in which all the MS clinicians share cases they want input on, I learned about a disease called MOGAD that can present similarly to MS. They both have very similar symptoms, but in MOGAD a very specific protein in the myelin sheath called MOG is attacked rather than a broader attack on the myelin sheath. Additionally, in MOGAD, lesions tend to resolve over time, which isn’t the case with MS. At the meeting, the clinicians were discussing whether a certain patient has MOGAD or MS based on their MRI and MoG-IgG blood test.

Seeing patients was once again a highlight of my week. Last week, I only saw patients with relapse-remitting MS, meaning that their symptoms for the most part were not currently active, but this week I also observed appointments with progressive MS patients. Overall, of all the patients I’ve seen, there was only one male patient, so I’m witnessing before my eyes the fact that MS heavily affects women more than men. Due to this fact, my clinician and I were discussing doing some analysis on how menopause impacts MS trajectories, which I think could be really interesting. In terms of processing data for my immersion project, I finished co-registering the MRI lesion masks into MNI-space so that all the different individual’s brains are on the same template. I started running a tool that estimates structural connectivity (Network Estimation Tool) in the brain, but it will take a while to complete. 


This week I also had the opportunity to join Jada and Smrithi in the cardiology. In specific, I was able to observe a trans catheter tricuspid valve replacement. I was able to interact with a couple of nurses, doctors, and the reps of the valve replacement device. It was exciting first procedure to witness, and I'm looking forward to seeing more in the future! 

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