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Therapy targeting the immune system's B cells might offer better odds against relapses in the early stages of multiple sclerosis (MS), a new study reports. People taking IV drugs that lower immune B-cell levels had a 62% lower rate of relapse than those taking pills frequently prescribed for early MS, the study team found.

Patients were also less likely to develop brain scarring associated with MS if they started B-cell-depleting therapies slightly after their diagnosis, researchers said.

However, disability progressed about the same in all MS patients within two years of their diagnosis, regardless of the early treatment they were given, results show.

"People with MS and their doctors have more treatment choices than ever before, but it is still hard to know which treatment to start with," said senior researcher Dr. Fredrik Piehl, a professor of neurology with Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

"The treatment groups already differed in important patient characteristics, suggesting that doctors were to some extent selecting treatments based on the individual patient," Piehl said in a news release. "Even so, B-cell-depleting therapies and other strong treatments were linked to fewer relapses and fewer MRI changes. But after two years, we did not see clear differences in disability scores."

There's been a boom during the last two decades in medications that promise to help slow the progression of MS, but few studies have been done comparing how well they perform head-to-head.

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