A P-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results At T1, 62 patients (21 men, 41 women) participated, age 20–77 years. At T2 (5 years later), 44 patients participated (14 men, 30 women), 13 had been lost to follow-up, 4 refused to participate, and 1 patient had died. The proportion of male to female participants is in line with the gender distribution of MS (2:1 for women:men; Kingwell et al. 2013). The majority of participants were living maritally (69.4% at T1 and 77.3% at T2). In clinical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical terms, patients primarily presented relapsing-remitting MS (80.64% at T1 and 68.18% at T2). The average duration of disease was

10.92 years at T1, and the average degree of handicap was 3.07 at T1 and 3.83 at T2. In total, 59.7% of participants were professionally active at T1, and 56.8% at T2. The demographic and clinical characteristics Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of the study population are presented in Table1. Table 1 Demographic and clinical characteristics of the study population at timepoints 1 and 2. Table2 shows the frequency of alexithymia, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical depression, and anxiety at T1

and T2. At T1, we observed 38.7% nonalexithymic patients; 30.6% borderline alexithymic patients and 30.6% alexithymic patients. These proportions did not differ significantly Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical between T1 and T2 (Table2). Table 2 Frequency of depression, anxiety, and alexithymia at timepoints 1 and 2. Moderate or severe anxiety was observed in 27 patients (34.6%) at T1 and 20 (45.5%) at T2 and no significant difference

was observed between T1 and T2. Conversely, there was a significant reduction in the proportion of patients presenting depression (moderate or severe) at T2 versus T1 (P = 0.02 by the MacNemar test). Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Accordingly, 25 patients (40.4%) had moderate to severe depression at T1 and 12 (26.9%) at T2. Patient scores from the different questionnaires administered either at T1 and T2 are shown in Table3. The overall depression score HDAC inhibitor decreased significantly between T1 and T2 (P = 0.01), while the scores for anxiety and alexithymia remained stable, with the exception of the “EOT” factor of alexithymia, which decreased significantly between timepoints (P = 0.005). We also observed a small increase in EDSS score, indicating a slight progression of the level of handicap in these patients after 5 years (+0.76). Table 3 Changes in overall patient scores for depression, anxiety, and alexithymia between timepoints 1 and 2. While overall scores for alexithymia and anxiety did not change significantly between T1 and T2, we did note interindividual differences in scores between the two timepoints (Table4).