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Article History

Accepted: 5 March 2023

First Online: 18 April 2023

Declarations

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: This study was funded by the UK Multiple Sclerosis Society, Grant no. 30. The research was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) infrastructure at Leeds. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the National Health Service, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. Yasmina Okan acknowledges support from a Population Research Fellowship awarded by Cancer Research UK (reference C57775/A22182). Jeremy Chataway is supported in part by the NIHR, University College London Hospitals, Biomedical Research Centre, London, UK. The funders have had no input into the study design, collection and analysis of data, the writing of the manuscript or the decision to submit it for publication.

: Jeremy Chataway has received support from the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme and Health Technology Assessment Programme (NIHR); UK Multiple Sclerosis Society and National Multiple Sclerosis Society; and the Rosetrees Trust. In the last 3 years, he has been a local principal investigator for trials in multiple sclerosis funded by Receptos, Novartis and Biogen Idec, and has received an investigator grant from Novartis outside this work. He has taken part in advisory boards/consultancy for Roche, Merck, MedDay, Biogen and Celgene. Klaus Schmierer has received support from the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme and Health Technology Assessment Programme (NIHR); UK Multiple Sclerosis Society and National Multiple Sclerosis Society; consulting fees from Biogen, Merck, Novartis and Roche, and payments for lecturing activities from Biogen, Merck, Novartis, Roche, Teva, Neurology Academy and Medscape. Hilary L. Bekker provides guidance, based on her academic expertise in medical decision making, to health policy organisations, patient advocacy groups, health professionals and health scientists on research methods and techniques to develop and evaluate patient decision aids and shared decision-making interventions. Her time and expenses in attending meetings, carrying out evaluations and collaborating with other projects are remunerated. She does not gain financially from the outcomes or outputs of these collaborations. Helen Ford has received support from the Health Technology Assessment Programme (NIHR) and the UK MS Society. In the past 3 years, Helen Ford has been a local principal investigator for trials in multiple sclerosis funded by Biogen Idec, Novartis and Roche and has taken part in advisory boards and consultancy for Biogen, Merck, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi-Genzyme and Teva. Edward Webb, David Meads, Ieva Eskytė, George Pepper, Joachim Marti, Yasmina Okan, Sue Pavitt and Ana Manzano have no conflicts of interest that are directly relevant to the content of this article.

: Approval for this study was given by a National Health Service Research Ethics Committee. The MS Register has been approved by the South West Central Bristol National Research Ethics Service (16/SW/0194).

: All participants gave informed consent before completing the survey, as well as consent to merge their responses with data from the UK MS Register.

: Patients gave informed consent regarding publishing anonymised data.

: Discrete choice experiment data are not publicly available as consent was not obtained for this. They may be shared on a case-by-case basis if an application is made to Leeds Institute of Health Sciences and a formal data sharing agreement is entered into. For access to UK MS Register data, see .

: Not applicable.

: All authors conceived the study, defined the study aims and contributed to the survey design. EW and DM collected the data. EW conducted the statistical analysis and wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and all authors contributed to and approved the final version.