Jennifer van Amerom, an NMO patient advocate, discusses what to do when an NMO treatment has plateaued, and when a patient should consider switching treatments. Read her column, “The Beginners Guide to Walking.”
Transcript
I’m so excited that there are a lot of different treatment options now available for NMOSD patients. And so if you’re at a point now where you think the treatment you’re on has plateaued — and it can happen where you’ve been on one for a period of time and it’s worked, and suddenly it stopped working, and you have relapses — that was certainly my experience.
And if that happens for you, my advice would be to do some research, identify what other treatment options are available to you in whatever country you live in. And then to bring them forward to your neurologist and see if there are viable options.
If you’re seriously considering switching your NMOSD treatment plan before your next visit, it’s really important that you do your homework around the different types of treatment options available to you and then understanding what the onboarding process is, and then the frequency of that treatment plan so that you know which ones you would consider trying.
And it’s also really important to identify which ones are similar to ones that didn’t work for you in the past, or that you might potentially be allergic to, because those are then not viable options for you.
