In a different context, dissemination in space and time could be a plot point in a science fiction novel.
To neurologists, the phrase is indivisible from the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS), the disease characterized by multifocal relapses over time.
With advances in imaging and other specific biomarkers, the diagnosis of MS has become increasingly untethered from strictly clinical manifestations of this spatial and temporal profile.
The latest version of the McDonald criteria illustrates a trend, and a key opportunity, for clinical neurology: the development and implementation of specific biomarkers in the diagnosis of neurologic disease.
This is the third in a series of Continuum editor’s prefaces I have dedicated to opportunities in our field—Neurology Action Potentials—and touches a topic that generates some controversy.