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.
In MS patients commonly have neuropathic pain. It often affects a limb or limbs, and sometimes involved the trunk. It is described in a various ways but often the following descriptions are used: “burning, tingling, jabbing, electrical, itching”.
Some people describe the MS hug as a sharp pain,4 whereas others describe it as dull or more neuropathic in quality, like burning, tickling, or tingling. Still, others may note a crushing or constricting sensation.
The symptoms can be similar, but people with fibromyalgia are more likely to experience depression, irritable bowel syndrome, and widespread, persistent pain. Symptoms more common with MS include weakness, vision problems, muscle spasms, and bowel or bladder issues.
This type of pain can occur all over the body. If a person has neuropathic pain in their back, it can manifest as a sharp, stabbing, or shooting sensation. A person may also experience a burning sensation in the lower back. This pain can feel as if it moves from the lower back into the leg.
People with MS may notice a sudden electric shock-like sensation running down their spine after bending their neck forward. This symptom, known as Lhermitte's sign, is often the first sign of MS or an MS relapse.
People living with multiple sclerosis (MS) can present with a wide variety of symptoms, from motor and cognitive issues to physical and emotional changes. Some people with MS experience significant pain or stiffness in their back and neck.
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.
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).
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.
The most common pain syndromes experienced by people with MS include: headache (seen more in MS than the general population) continuous burning pain in the extremities. back pain.
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.
The early signs and symptoms of MS can be the same for women and men. One of the more obvious first signs of MS is a problem with vision, known as optic neuritis. This is often because it's a more concrete symptom as opposed to vaguer neurological symptoms like numbness and tingling.
My brain goes fuzzy, I can't think clearly, my speech slurs and my eyesight goes. Swallowing becomes more difficult, my balance gets worse and my legs feel heavy and clumsy. Unlike the limits of normal, everyday tiredness, which may give a little when pushed against, MS fatigue can feel like a barrier.
Cranial nerve damage or inflammation could contribute to a feeling of pressure in your head. The optic nerve relays visual messages to the CNS so inflammation or damage to or near it can cause blurred vision, double vision, loss of vision, and pain.
This nerve damage makes it hard to move your muscles and leads to a heavy feeling in your legs (or other areas of your body). MS spasticity can cause any muscle in your body to feel weak, heavy and difficult to move. It is a result of damage along the nerves of the brain and spinal cord controlling movement.
Here's where MS (typically) starts
You may experience eye pain, blurred vision and headache. It often occurs on one side and can eventually lead to partial or total vision loss. Spinal cord inflammation, or what's called partial transverse myelitis, is the second most common symptom Shoemaker typically sees.
Some of the most common early signs are: fatigue (a kind of exhaustion which is out of all proportion to the task undertaken) stumbling more than before. unusual feelings in the skin (such as pins and needles or numbness)
An MRI scanner uses a strong magnetic field to create a detailed image of inside your brain and spinal cord. 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.
Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) is a rare chronic disease that happens when your immune system attacks specific parts of your central nervous system. Experts previously thought this was a rare type of multiple sclerosis (MS) but now recognize it's a separate condition.
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.
Can I have multiple sclerosis for years and not know it? Yes. MS can go undetected for years. Research has suggested that many patients experience MS-related symptoms and signs several years before receiving a definite diagnosis of the disease.