The clinical relevance of multiple sclerosis genetics: from susceptibility to disease severity and progression.

Multiple sclerosis genetics has identified hundreds of risk loci, but susceptibility findings have modest individual predictive value for disability accumulation, disease course, and treatment response.

• Why it matters: The gap is that risk variants do not yet explain how disability progresses, why courses differ, or who responds to therapy, limiting direct clinical use.
• What they did: Large-scale genome-wide association studies mapped hundreds of loci, and follow-up work using rare variants, severity/disability genetics, epigenetics, gene-environment analyses, and Epstein-Barr virus research extends the framework beyond susceptibility.
• The result: Current clinical relevance is mainly mechanistic—interpreting pathways, prioritising therapeutic targets, supporting causal inference, guiding biomarker discovery, and enriching research cohorts—while future value likely requires integrating genetics with longitudinal multi-omic data.

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