Awareness of MS is no longer enough; systems must now catch up 
Multiple sclerosis is no longer a disease that medicine simply manages in silence. With more than 2.9 million people living with MS globally, and its prevalence continuing to rise across the Middle East and North Africa, the condition demands a response proportionate to its scale.
In the UAE, MS has crossed the threshold from moderate to high risk, with 19 diagnosed cases per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that is likely to continue growing as detection improves and populations age. The question is not whether we are aware of that trajectory; we are. The question is whether our healthcare systems, research investments, and policy frameworks are being built with sufficient urgency to meet it.
Awareness has helped immensely. Over the past decade, campaigns have steadily reduced the stigma around neurological conditions, encouraged earlier presentation to clinicians, and helped patients understand that an MS diagnosis is not a death sentence. That is genuine progress.
But progress on the stigma surrounding the condition is not complete. For many people living with MS, the gap between a clinical diagnosis and a life lived without apology or limitation remains wide. Social attitudes, workplace cultures, and even healthcare interactions can still reflect assumptions about what an MS diagnosis means for a person’s capabilities and ambitions. The work of challenging those assumptions — ensuring that people with MS feel genuinely able to lead full, fulfilling lives — belongs to awareness too, and it remains unfinished.
And awareness is just a beginning, not a strategy. The transition from awareness to action runs on two tracks simultaneously. One is cultural: continuing to dismantle the stigma that still shapes how people with MS are seen by employers, communities, and sometimes clinicians — and, perhaps most importantly, how they see themselves. The other is structural: shortening the time between symptom onset and confirmed diagnosis, expanding access to disease-modifying therapies, and ultimately developing interventions that can repair neurological damage rather than merely slow it. Neither track is optional, and neither is complete. Progress on both will be determined not by how many people know what MS is, but by the quality of the systems — clinical, social, and scientific — we build around those who live with it.
What those systems require, above all, is data. Longitudinal patient registries, genomic datasets, and interoperable clinical records are the raw material of modern neurological research. Without them, clinicians cannot identify which patients are at risk of faster progression, researchers cannot develop precision therapies, and policymakers cannot allocate resources where they are most needed.
The UAE Genome Project, which aims to sequence the genomes of 1 million UAE nationals, represents exactly the kind of infrastructure investment that can accelerate understanding of complex chronic conditions like MS. It is the model that other parts of the healthcare system should follow.
The We the UAE 2031 vision explicitly targets a place among the top 10 countries globally for healthcare quality and quality of life, an ambition that cannot be realized through reactive, episode-by-episode clinical care alone. Nor can the National Strategy for Wellbeing 2031, which frames individual health as inseparable from national progress. These commitments require healthcare systems capable of anticipating chronic disease, not merely responding to it: multidisciplinary MS clinics that bring together neurologists, physiotherapists, mental health practitioners, and specialist nurses under one pathway; structured protocols that reduce the average diagnostic delay, which internationally still runs to several years for many patients; and coordinated mental health support, given that depression and anxiety affect the majority of people living with MS at some point in their lives. These are the tangible outcomes that make frameworks meaningful.
Internationally, the Pathways to Cures Roadmap, a framework developed across academic institutions and patient organizations, offers a useful structure: stopping disease progression, restoring lost function through neural repair, and ending MS for future generations. Each stage requires a different kind of investment. Stopping progression depends on better early treatment access and real-world outcome data. Restoration demands translational research at the intersection of neurology, immunology, and regenerative medicine. Ending MS entirely requires sustained funding for basic science and genomic research, which may not yield returns for a decade or more but, without investment today, will never yield returns at all.
In 2024, the UAE took a significant step with the establishment of the National Coalition for MS, the country’s first multisector platform designed to unify stakeholders across research, clinical care, and community support.
In 2025, a landmark AED25 million ($6.8 million) grant from Erth Zayed Philanthropies deepened that commitment, providing the capital to begin translating coordination into concrete clinical and academic progress. The UAE National Multiple Sclerosis Society, founded in 2022 under the Ministry of Community Empowerment, has been central to that effort — not as an end in itself, but as one piece of a larger infrastructure that must keep growing. Patient-first advocacy, research investment, policy engagement, and community integration are not alternative priorities; they are sequential stages of the same project.
There is still much to do. Multidisciplinary care pathways remain inconsistent. Research participation among UAE MS patients is limited by the absence of the kind of large-scale registry infrastructure that countries like Sweden or the UK have built over decades. Mental health referral within MS care is still treated in too many settings as secondary rather than integral. The scientific talent pipeline — the neurologists, data scientists, and translational researchers who will ultimately deliver the treatments of the next generation — requires sustained investment in training, international placements, and laboratory infrastructure if the UAE is to become an active contributor to global MS research.
International events such as World MS Day exist to take stock of all of this: what has been achieved, and what remains. This year, the honest answer is that the foundations are stronger than they have ever been, and the ambition is clearly present. But foundations are not outcomes. The investments being made in genomics, precision medicine, multisector collaboration, and patient-centered care need to be matched by the systems, accountability structures, and sustained collective will to deliver on them — not over a generation, but within the timelines of those living with MS today.
Awareness raised the alarm. Diagnosis identifies who is affected. The phase we are now entering raises a harder question: Are we building — fast enough and with sufficient rigor — the research ecosystems, clinical infrastructure, and data capabilities that give those people, and future generations, a genuinely different future? That is the question World MS Day 2026 left every decision-maker asking.
• Dr. Fatima Al-Kaabi is the vice chair of the UAE National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
