Originally Posted by glenntaj

--with the "paired oligoclonal bands" business is that they compared the results from your cerebrospinal fluid with those from your serum and they looked similar; this is generally thought to be less indicative of central nervous system disease then if there are different banding patterns between serum and fluid, or if there are no bands in serum but there is presence in fluid. In this latter case, an absence of banding in the serum indicates that there is immunoglobulin processing going on in the cerebrospinal fluid itself, which is more likely to be present in central nervous system disease (and in some other conditions, such as Lyme disease and Guillain Barre syndrome).

See:

http://www.clinlabnavigator.com/olig...ds-in-csf.html