Holiday Hours

With the exception of Inova hospitals, Inova Emergency Care and Inova-GoHealth Urgent Care, all Inova outpatient offices will be closed for the Christmas and New Year's Day holidays – Wednesday, Dec. 25 and Wednesday, Jan. 1.

Some Inova care sites have additional closures for the holidays, which will be noted on the relevant location pages. 

Diagnostics

  • Lumbar Puncture: A lumbar puncture is similar to an epidural given to a woman during childbirth, but instead of administering anesthesia, a small sample of cerebrospinal fluid is collected and sent to the lab for testing. We recommend this be done by a radiologist who will use x-ray imaging to guide the needle placement.
  • Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT): This device takes a picture of your retina, allowing us to measure retinal thickness, which can help your doctor monitor MS.
  • MRI: Generates a picture of your brain and spinal cord, allowing us to see MS lesions. Not all MRI machines are created (or programmed) equally. A high-resolution (3-T) machine with MS sequences can distinguish MS spots from normal spots. A normal (1.5-T) MRI frequently misses MS.