Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★
Are you lonely? Have you lost a loved on during COVID-19? Have you lost your job or had to reduce your income because of COVID-19? Can you make ends meet at the end of the month? Are you worried about your future? How is your relationship with your partner? Are you depressed? Anxious? Are you sleeping well? Are you drinking too much alcohol? Are you feeling guilty? Self-loathing? Failed ambitions? …..
These sorts of questions rarely come up in a standard MSology consultation because most classically trained HCPs working in a secondary or tertiary care environment haven’t been trained to deal with what we refer to as the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH). However, it is clear the SDoH have an outsized impact on health outcomes, which is likely to include MS outcomes. This is why we launched our #ThinkSocial campaign several years ago and have started several activities to see if there is anything we can do to help tackle the SDoH.
A story: Recently one of my patients chastised me for telling her off for her poor diet, which consisted mainly of bread. She lives alone, which may explain why she eats so poorly. She has marmite or jam on toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and if she feels hungry another piece of toast for dinner…..
What should Prof G do to manage this patient?….. find out.
I can clearly see the cynics saying ‘focus on what you are trained to do and leave the SDoH to general practice, social care and the charitable sector’. Yes and no. Yes, it is easy to say this is not my responsibility, but when you are trying to do your best medically to improve MS outcomes only to get trumped by the SDoH it makes it look like your service is failing. Our patient population in the east end of London is one of the most deprived populations in England. When we recently analysed deprivation data from HES (hospital episode statistics) the only area worse off than us in England was Liverpool. On the other end of the scale were Cambridge and Oxford. So if we compared outcomes of the MS patient populations in Liverpool and east London and note they are doing worse than pwMS living in Oxford and Cambridge it may not have anything to do with our MS and other services, but simply represent levels of deprivation and its associated poorer outcomes.
How SDoH result in poor outcomes is likely to be due to the effects of chronic stress on the brain. Stress is a well-defined biological or physiological response of the body. Stress results in high levels of so-called stress hormones. These stress hormones have a direct and negative effect on the brain and other organ systems, which causes them to age prematurely and malfunction. Ask anyone who is stressed and they will tell they don’t feel well. Stressed people and stressed populations are more forgetful, more tired, have poorer sleep and tend to engage in unhealthy behaviours (smoking, alcohol, poor diet, sedentary) and have much higher mental health problems (depression, anxiety, addiction, suicide). In general, pwMS are more stressed and the reasons for this are not only obvious but potentially modifiable.
The main stress hormone is cortisol. Cortisol works via glucocorticoid receptors, which are found all over the body including the hippocampus, amygdala and frontal cortex, three brain regions involved in memory and emotions. Chronic stress is associated with reduced volume and malfunction of these areas. In pwMS, these areas may already be damaged from MS lesions, which increases the MS brain’s vulnerability to chronic stress. So if you want to improve MS outcomes you can’t ignore the SDoH and chronic stress. Do you agree?
This is why I have been promoting the marginal gains philosophy to the management of MS, which is based on Sir David Brailsford approach to competitive cycling and is the reason why the British cycling teams has been so dominant in the last two decades.
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
Sir David Brailsford
“If we break down everything we can think of that goes into improving MS outcomes, and then improving each one by 1%, we will get a significant increase when we put them all together.”
Prof. Gavin Giovannoni
So when we launched our ‘no patient left behind’ motto at the first MS Academy ‘Raising-the-Bar’ meeting to address variation and inequalities in access to MS healthcare in the UK we included a workstream to tackle the SDoH. How we do this is currently being defined, but we have an ambitious programme of work. Whatever happens, we will need to involve the whole MS community, which includes readers of this blog. So if you have any ideas to tackle the SDoH please share them with us.
Lupien et al. The effects of chronic stress on the human brain: from neurotoxicity, to vulnerability, to opportunity. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology April 2018, 49:91-105.
For the last five decades, science has managed to delineate the mechanisms by which stress hormones can impact on the human brain. Receptors for glucocorticoids are found in the hippocampus, amygdala and frontal cortex, three brain regions involved in memory processing and emotional regulation. Studies have shown that chronic exposure to stress is associated with reduced volume of the hippocampus and that chronic stress can modulate volumes of both the amygdala and frontal cortex, suggesting neurotoxic effects of stress hormones on the brain. Yet, other studies report that exposure to early adversity and/or familial/social stressors can increase vulnerability to stress in adulthood. Models have been recently developed to describe the roles that neurotoxic and vulnerability effects can have on the developing brain. These models suggest that developing early stress interventions could potentially counteract the effects of chronic stress on the brain and results going along with this hypothesis are summarized.
CoI: multiple
Twitter: @gavinGiovannoni Medium: @gavin_24211
