MS can damage the nerves that affect your muscles. This can cause acute or paroxysmal pain in the form of spasms. Your arms and legs might shoot out uncontrollably and might have pain like cramping or pulling. Nerve pain can also be chronic in the form of painful or unusual sensations on your skin.
Tightness or stiffness of the muscles, called spasticity, is caused directly by MS. Spasticity, will alter walking and cause pulling on the joints. This can result in pain typically in the ankles, knees, hips and back.
The pain may come and go or it may be constant and debilitating. Paresthesia: This feels like numbness, pins and needles, burning, severe itchiness, tingling, buzzing or vibrating sensations.
Abnormal sensations can be a common initial symptom of MS. This often takes the form of numbness or tingling in different parts of your body, such as the arms, legs or trunk, which typically spreads out over a few days.
MS symptoms can come and go and change over time. They can be mild, or more severe. The symptoms of MS are caused by your immune system attacking the nerves in your brain or spinal cord by mistake. These nerves control lots of different parts of your body.
When you're first diagnosed with MS it can be difficult to work out if you're having a relapse or not. This is because many MS symptoms can fluctuate from day to day, so changes might be part of the everyday up and down pattern of MS, rather than the start of a relapse.
Symptoms of MS can be better or worse at different times of the day. For example, spasticity can worsen at night, while fatigue can worsen during the day and after activities. However, this is unique to each person.
MS can damage the nerves that affect your muscles. This can cause acute or paroxysmal pain in the form of spasms. Your arms and legs might shoot out uncontrollably and might have pain like cramping or pulling. Nerve pain can also be chronic in the form of painful or unusual sensations on your skin.
Feeling weakness in one or both of your legs is called monoparesis or paraparesis and can be a direct result of MS.
A lack of feeling or a pins-and-needles sensation can be the first sign of nerve damage from MS. It usually happens in your face, arms, or legs, and on one side of your body.
People should consider the diagnosis of MS if they have one or more of these symptoms: vision loss in one or both eyes. acute paralysis in the legs or along one side of the body. acute numbness and tingling in a limb.
Numbness or Tingling
Numbness of the face, body, or extremities (arms and legs) is often the first symptom experienced by those eventually diagnosed as having MS.
These include fibromyalgia and vitamin B12 deficiency, muscular dystrophy (MD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), migraine, hypo-thyroidism, hypertension, Beçhets, Arnold-Chiari deformity, and mitochondrial disorders, although your neurologist can usually rule them out quite easily.
It is most often seen in the hips, legs and arms and particularly when muscles, tendons and ligaments remain immobile for some time. Back pain may occur due to improper seating or incorrect posture while walking.
Surveys for patient pain indicate that the most common pain syndromes experienced in MS are: continuous burning in extremities; headache; back pain; and painful tonic spasms.
Spasticity is a common symptom in MS. It is a tightness or stiffness of the muscles – occurring typically in the legs (calf or thigh), groin, and buttocks. Although less common, some individuals may experience spasticity in their back. These are all muscles that help people to stand and balance in an upright position.
MRI scans can identify lesions that occur due to MS. MS lesions can show white matter inflammation, demyelination, and scarring, or sclerosis.
Back pain and leg pain in MS, along with muscle spasms and burning or tingling sensations, can mimic sciatica symptoms. But pain in MS is from lesions — damage or scarring — that cause inflammation in the central nervous system.
Nerve pain often feels like a shooting, stabbing or burning sensation. Sometimes it can feel as sharp and sudden as an electric shock. You may be very sensitive to touch or cold. You may also experience pain as a result of touch that would not normally be painful, such as something lightly brushing your skin.
It is one of the more common symptoms of MS. Spasticity may be as mild as the feeling of tightness of muscles or may be so severe as to produce painful, uncontrollable spasms of extremities, usually of the legs. Spasticity may also produce feelings of pain or tightness in and around joints, and can cause low back pain.
Most MS exacerbations last from a few days to several weeks or even months.
“MS pain that commonly interferes with sleep is neuropathic pain — often described as burning, shooting, searing, or deeply aching. This pain can be relentless and is often worse at night.” Musculoskeletal pain can occur from a compensatory gait pattern (due to leg weakness or foot drop).
A recent study of 5,300 people with MS found that more than half of participants reported fatigue, tingling and numbness, cognitive issues, muscular weakness, pain, and depression.
Paroxysmal is a term for any MS symptoms that begin suddenly and only last for a few seconds or a few minutes at most. However, these symptoms may reappear a few times or many times a day in similar short bursts. They may be painful and disrupt your everyday activities or they can just be annoying.