Aaron Boster

And so those numbers are actually highly statistically significant.

And it sort of reinforces this concept that mono may be a requirement to develop MS.

Now, that doesn't mean that a pasty white kid who was around some smoke and didn't have a high vitamin D and got mono is going to get MS.

Not at all.

But as we understand, those are the steps that are probably involved in later on going on to develop MS.

It's a really interesting discussion.

I was trained in Detroit, Michigan, where there's a very large population of African-Americans that live in Detroit.

And as a result, there was a very large African-American MS population that we saw.

And when I was coming up through the ranks, I was taught incorrectly that MS was a disease of young white women.

And that ethnic minorities were less likely to develop MS.

And that's false.

And so it turns out that the percentages of MS amongst African Americans, Hispanic Americans are the same as white people.

There's just more white people in the United States.

Now, what's very, very important is that, unfortunately, if you are an ethnic minority and you get MS, the disease is driven faster.

So African-Americans with MS tend to have a much more aggressive disease course.

Hispanic-Americans tend to have a much more aggressive disease course.

And that factors into our thinking about how aggressive we are with therapies, et cetera.

It doesn't appear to be.

Now, of course, there are some very serious concerns about access to care, which I don't want to gloss over.

However, there's some beautiful studies done mostly out of UCSF, which try to parse that out in separate from those issues.