Elena Charalambidou¹, Marios Pantzaris², Ioannis Patrikios^{2, 3,}

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a complex, multifactorial, chronic disease resulting from the interplay between two major factors, environmental and genetic. Cyprus is one of the countries without real history on epidemiological information for the disease and without any records based on scientific evidence. Methods: The present study is a descriptive as well as a comparative study. We analyzed retrospectively the records of the MS patients admitted to the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics (CING), between the years 2000-2014. A total of 427 MS patients were studied that is the 25% of the total MS patients in Cyprus. Results: The estimated prevalence of Cyprus was 198:100,000, with the district of Famagusta associated with the highest prevalence (57:100,000). The male to female ratio was1.6:1 and the mean age during exacerbation of the disease was 37.4 for females and 38.7 for males. The distribution of incidents according to place of birth was not statistically significant (p = 0.152); but the distribution of incidents by place of residence at the time of diagnosis was statistically significant (p = 0.049). Family history had no any statistical significance (p=0.246). The majority of the patients (66.2%, p=0.038) reported to be married during the disease diagnosis and 22.5% were serious smokers (p=0.81).Moreover, 0.74% out of the primary progressive and 0.49% out of the secondary progressive patients died as a result of the disease. Conclusions: The prevalence was higher than the expected, higher than the official reported by the Atlas of MS 2013 and disproportional to the global median prevalence of 90/100,000.Parameters like profession and smoking habit had no significance versus the disease of MS.

multiple sclerosis, MS incidence, MS prevalence, relapsing-remitting, multifactorial, autoimmune, neurodegenerative