Q: Should I suspend blood monitoring during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Should I avoid attending my hospital appointments?

This is something you need to discuss with your own MS team.

However, in general the aim of the public health measures to contain COVID-19 is to reduce your exposure to the virus, i.e. personal hygiene (handwashing, social distancing, social isolation and avoiding travel to high-risk areas). In general, COVID-19 is not a hospital acquired, but a community acquired, infection. This, however, may change as more patients with the disease get admitted to hospitals.

Therefore, it makes sense to reduce the spread of COVID-19 you should avoid attending hospital. This could mean doing telephone or telemedicine follow-up appointments, delaying MRI scans by a few weeks, shifting onto an extended-interval dosing schedule for drugs such as natalizumab, delaying infusions of DMTs such as ocrelizumab, rituximab and alemtuzumab, asking for your blood and urine monitoring to be done at home or at your GP.

Should I suspend blood and urine monitoring?

No you should not. The purpose of the monitoring is to pick-up issues of safety. This is most important for people previously treated with alemtuzumab; the blood and urine monitoring is being done to detect secondary autoimmune diseases early so they can be treated earlier. Some of these autoimmune diseases can be life threatening, which is why my answer here is no!

With regard to the other DMTs the monitoring requirements good be delayed and scheduled altered, particularly if you have are well established on the treatments and your bloods have been stable.

Date & Disclaimer: 18-March-2020; please note this information will be time limited and will change as new data emerges.