Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic illness that affects your central nervous system. Your nerve cells are surrounded by a layer called myelin. Myelin protects your nerves and helps them send signals quickly from your brain to the rest of your body. In MS, your immune system attacks the myelin layer and damages it.
Contents. You may have to adapt your daily life if you're diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), but with the right care and support many people can lead long, active and healthy lives.
Here's where MS (typically) starts
Although a number of MS symptoms can appear early on, two stand out as occurring more often than others: Optic neuritis, or inflammation of the optic nerve, is usually the most common, Shoemaker says. You may experience eye pain, blurred vision and headache.
MS can appear at any age but most commonly manifests between the ages of 20 and 40. It affects women two to three times as often as men. Almost one million people in the United States have MS, making it one of the most common causes of neurological disability among young adults in North America.
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.
The researchers found that over the past 25 years, life expectancy for people with MS has increased. However, they also found that the median age of survival of people with MS was 76 years, versus 83 years for the matched population.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
It's very accurate and can pinpoint the exact location and size of any inflammation, damage or scarring (lesions). MRI scans confirm a diagnosis in over 90 per cent of people with MS.
It can cause symptoms like problems with vision, arm or leg movement, sensation or balance. It's a lifelong condition that can sometimes cause serious disability. In many cases, it's possible to treat symptoms. Average life expectancy is slightly reduced for people with MS.
What Does MS Feels Like? 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. It tends to go away on its own.
While there are no definitive blood tests for diagnosing MS, they can rule out other conditions that may mimic MS symptoms, including Lyme disease, collagen-vascular diseases, rare hereditary disorders, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Does early MS show up on an MRI? MS lesions are generally visible on MRI scans from the earliest stages of the disease, and they may even be apparent before a person experiences any MS symptoms.
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.
This fungal infection may cause the nails to become thick, separate from the nail bed, and appear discolored. According to one study, onychomycosis is slightly more common in people diagnosed with MS than it is in the general population.
But studies which have investigated whether stress causes MS have been mixed. Although the person with MS knows from their experience that their MS symptoms started after or alongside a stressful period of time, there is no direct evidence that stress causes MS — although it might trigger it.
But ongoing research shows many reasons could be at play, including your genes, where you live, and even the air you breathe. Though some things, like emotional trauma and infection, can worsen MS symptoms, there is no evidence to suggest that anything you do could cause the disease or stop its natural progress.
You're not born with symptoms of MS. If you develop MS it's usually diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 40. However, it can also develop earlier or later than that.
MS is not an inherited disease — it is not passed down from generation to generation. But people can inherit genetic risk. This means that MS is not genetic in the simpler way that black hair or dimples are.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease of the central nervous system that can affect the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.
An eye exam can detect early signs of MS. Regular eye exams are critical because what may seem like a vision-related problem might be an indication of a broader health issue, like Janna learned during her eye exam.