Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a condition that can affect the brain and spinal cord, causing a wide range of potential symptoms, including problems with vision, arm or leg movement, sensation or balance. It’s a lifelong condition that can sometimes cause serious disability, although it can occasionally be mild.
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What will MS do to me?
Multiple sclerosis, or MS, is a long-lasting disease that can affect your brain, spinal cord, and the optic nerves in your eyes. It can cause problems with vision, balance, muscle control, and other basic body functions. The effects are often different for everyone who has the disease.
How does MS affect your life?
Sometimes people with MS have problems with memory, concentration, problem-solving, and/or other cognitive functions. These symptoms are usually caused directly by the disease’s damage to myelin and the nerve cells. However, cognitive symptoms can also be indirectly affected by depression, anxiety, stress, or fatigue.
Can MS affect your personality?
While many with MS will experience depression or anxiety at some point, more rarely, some people experience changes to their emotions or behaviour that don’t seem to make sense, or that they aren’t able to control.
Can you live a normal life with MS?
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.
How long does MS take to disable you?
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. Resolution is often complete.
What are the four stages of MS?
What are the 4 stages of MS?
- Clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) This is the first episode of symptoms caused by inflammation and damage to the myelin covering on nerves in the brain or spinal cord.
- Relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS)
- Secondary-progressive MS (SPMS)
- Primary-progressive MS (PPMS)
Does MS change your appearance?
MS can change how your body looks as well as how it feels, but you can do much to boost your body image. Almost everyone worries about how they look. After all, it’s easy to focus on our physical flaws.
Can MS cause death?
It is rare, although not impossible, for someone to die from MS itself. However, some people with MS develop disabilities that make them very vulnerable to serious complications which can lead to death.
Can MS go away?
Multiple sclerosis treatment. There is currently no cure for MS. The goal of treatment is to help you cope with and relieve symptoms, slow the progress of the disease and maintain a good quality of life. This can be done through a combination of medicine and physical, occupational, and speech therapy.
Can MS cause anger issues?
MS can cause significant anxiety, distress, anger, and frustration from the moment of its very first symptoms. The uncertainty and unpredictability associated with MS is one of its most distressing aspects. In fact, anxiety is at least as common in MS as depression.
Can MS make you violent?
Study participants with MS were compared to a control group. The researchers found that people with MS were more likely to be angry (trait anger), have a higher intensity of anger (state anger), and express anger either outwardly or inwardly, as compared to the control group.
Does MS feel like anxiety?
Developing anxiety is normal with MS simply because MS is a frightening disease. Anxiety is a response to danger, and MS makes that anxiety warranted, which makes it harder to control. However, MS can also cause anxiety and depression as a result of the illness itself.
Can people with MS drive?
Although a diagnosis of MS itself does not automatically preclude you from driving, the loss of function associated with MS may affect driving skills.
Is MS curable if caught early?
There is no cure for multiple sclerosis. Treatment typically focuses on speeding recovery from attacks, slowing the progression of the disease and managing MS symptoms. Some people have such mild symptoms that no treatment is necessary.
Do all MS patients end up in a wheelchair?
4. Only about one-third of people with MS use wheelchairs 20 years after diagnosis. When we think of MS, most of us imagine a person who is unable to walk. MS does affect gait, mobility, muscle strength, and flexibility, but not for everyone.
Does MS get worse with age?
Over time, symptoms stop coming and going and begin getting steadily worse. The change may happen shortly after MS symptoms appear, or it may take years or decades. Primary-progressive MS: In this type, symptoms gradually get worse without any obvious relapses or remissions.
Can Covid trigger MS?
Indeed, some studies show that viral respiratory tract infections may be linked to most of the exacerbations of MS (Marrodan et al., 2019). If we focus on the coronavirus (CoV) family, there is clear evidence of its neurotropic character.
Does MS get worse at night?
Spasticity is one of the most common MS symptoms, and often feels worse at night. This is because it can be aggravated by reduced movement, tight muscles and pain from other symptoms.
What MS is worst?
Secondary progressive MS (SPMS) is a stage of MS which comes after relapsing remitting MS for many people. With this type of MS your disability gets steadily worse. You’re no longer likely to have relapses, when your symptoms get worse but then get better.
Can MS make you see things?
A problem with vision is one of the most common symptoms of MS, and often one of the first that people with MS notice. The symptoms can include blurred vision, double vision (diplopia), optic neuritis, involuntary rapid eye movement and occasionally, a total loss of sight.