Overview. Dizziness is a common symptom of MS. People with MS may feel off balance or lightheaded. Much less often, they have the sensation that they or their surroundings are spinning — a condition known as vertigo.
Problems with balance and feeling dizzy are common in MS, and can have knock-on effects on your walking. Like all MS symptoms, these issues affect people differently, and vary from day to day.
One of the most uncommon symptoms of multiple sclerosis is vertigo, which occurs in the central nervous system and disrupts the patient's ability to maintain a steady‐state of balance. Multiple sclerosis patients with central positional vertigo as their first symptom are uncommon in the medical literature.
Dizziness has many causes, but MS-induced dizziness is typically more severe and lasts for at least two days. “With MS, dizzy spells can cause you to have trouble walking down a hallway, for example, because your sense of equilibrium is so off,” explains Dr. Bermel.
Dizziness and vertigo can occur during an MS flare-up — a period of worsening symptoms. Flare-ups happen periodically for most people diagnosed with relapsing forms of MS, which include clinically isolated syndrome (CIS), relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS), and active secondary progressive MS (SPMS).
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.
Dizziness has many possible causes, including inner ear disturbance, motion sickness and medication effects. Sometimes it's caused by an underlying health condition, such as poor circulation, infection or injury. The way dizziness makes you feel and your triggers provide clues for possible causes.
MS affects the nerves in the brain. And this can cause hearing problems and other MS symptoms related to the ears. When MS damages the nerve fibres, or the myelin sheath around the outside, it can affect messages going to and from the ear.
Most symptoms develop abruptly, within hours or days. These attacks or relapses of MS typically reach their peak within a few days at most and then resolve slowly over the next several days or weeks so that a typical relapse will be symptomatic for about eight weeks from onset to recovery.
Many people with MS experience dizziness, in which you feel light-headed or off-balance, notes the NMSS. A less-common MS symptom is vertigo. When you have vertigo, you feel as though your surroundings are spinning around you, Dr. Kalb says, or that you are spinning.
What Is Autoimmune Inner Ear Disease? Autoimmune inner ear disease (AIED), is a rare disease that happens when your body's immune system mistakenly attacks your inner ear. It can cause dizziness, ringing in your ears, and hearing loss.
We also know that people with MS are particularly prone to a form of vertigo called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or BPPV. This causes symptoms of dizziness when you lay down in bed, roll over in bed or tip your head up in these kinds of positions.
Most people with MS can expect to live as long as people without MS, but the condition can affect their daily life. For some people, the changes will be minor. For others, they can mean a loss of mobility and other functions.
Common symptoms include fatigue, bladder and bowel problems, sexual problems, pain, cognitive and mood changes such as depression, muscular changes and visual changes. See your doctor for investigation and diagnosis of symptoms, since some symptoms can be caused by other illnesses.
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.
Note that the development of tinnitus, as well as any sudden change in hearing or in the inner ear, may indicate an MS flare. If you're experiencing these types of symptoms for the first time, contact your neurologist. Your health care team can help you manage these and other symptoms of a flare.
Hearing problems caused by MS are thought to be due to damage to the brainstem - the part of the brain that is also involved in vision and balance. Problems are often associated with other brainstem symptoms such as tinnitus and vertigo. Sudden hearing problems can show that you are having a relapse.
The most common causes of imbalance without dizziness are related to dysfunction of the muscles, joints and peripheral nerves (proprioceptive system), or the central nervous system (brain). People with bilateral vestibulopathy have balance issues but no dizziness if the damage affects both ears at the same time.
Dizziness. Feeling lightheaded or unsteady on your feet can be an unsettling experience, but it's a common sign of MS relapses. The dizziness is due to damage in the parts of your brain that control equilibrium.
People with relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS) may go through periods of new or worsening symptoms called flares. Common symptoms of MS flares can include feeling tired, pain, numbness, dizziness, muscle spasms, muscle weakness, brain fog, problems with going to the bathroom, or trouble seeing.
“Red flag” symptoms should alert you to a non-vestibular cause: persistent, worsening vertigo or dysequilibrium; atypical “non-peripheral” vertigo, such as vertical movement; severe headache, especially early in the morning; diplopia; cranial nerve palsies; dysarthria, ataxia, or other cerebellar signs; and ...
Your neurologist or movement disorder specialist will perform a history and physical examination of your eye movements, cranial nerves, speech, coordination, gait, and sensation. They may order imaging including MRIs or CT scans to determine a neurological cause of your balance symptoms.
Common ones include tension headaches, conditions that affect the sinuses, and ear infections. Abnormal or severe head pressure is sometimes a sign of a serious medical condition, such as a brain tumor or aneurysm.