Individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) often face important health-related and financial decisions that involve trade-offs between short-term and long-term benefits, yet decision making is rarely studied in MS patients. The temporal discounting paradigm is a useful tool for investigating such time-dependent choices in humans. Here, we investigated whether patients with relapsing-remitting MS differed from healthy controls when making choices between hypothetical monetary rewards available at different points in time. Participants were tested in two conditions: in one, the choice was between a smaller amount of money available immediately and a larger amount of money available at a later date; in the other, a fixed delay of 60 days was added to both options. We found that, compared with healthy controls, MS patients favored less the sooner reward in the condition involving an immediate reward, whereas no difference between MS patients and the control group emerged in the condition involving only delayed rewards. Moreover, the decreased immediacy bias was corroborated by lower scores at scale that assesses responsiveness to rewards in MS patients. Taken together, these findings indicate reduced sensitivity to immediate reward and a consequent stronger willingness to defer gratification in MS individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record

中文翻译：

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多发性硬化症降低了决策制定过程中立即奖励的敏感性。

多发性硬化症（MS）的患者通常面临与健康相关的重要财务决策，涉及短期和长期利益之间的权衡取舍，但很少对MS患者研究决策。时间折现范式是研究人类中这种与时间有关的选择的有用工具。在这里，我们调查了复发缓解型MS患者在不同时间点之间可用的假定金钱奖励之间进行选择时，是否与健康对照组不同。在两个条件下对参与者进行了测试：一是在立即可用的较小金额和以后的较大金额之间进行选择。另一种方法是，两个选项均增加了60天的固定延迟时间。我们发现，与健康对照组相比，MS患者更喜欢在涉及立即奖励的情况下的较早奖励，而MS患者与对照组之间在仅涉及延迟奖励的情况下没有区别。此外，通过评估MS患者对奖赏的反应程度的较低分数，可以证实即时偏差的减少。综上所述，这些发现表明MS个体对即刻回报的敏感性降低，并因此更愿意推迟满足。（PsycINFO数据库记录 这些发现表明，MS个体对即刻回报的敏感性降低，并因此更愿意推迟满足。（PsycINFO数据库记录 这些发现表明，MS个体对即刻回报的敏感性降低，并因此更愿意推迟满足。（PsycINFO数据库记录