What is Multiple Sclerosis?

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor, nor in the medical field.  My knowledge of MS comes from various websites, articles, and personal recollections of my grandmother's disease.

According to the Wikipedia article on the disease, multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease in which the myelin sheaths surrounding the axons of your nerves are attacked and damaged by your own body.  This causes the sheathes to scar over (giving the disease its name) and lose their ability to conduct nerve impulses along the axons.  Once these nerves are unable to transmit nerve signals, a person can experience any number of symptoms, and the disease often leads to both physical and cognitive damage.

There are four courses of MS that are generally recognized: relapsing-remitting, primary-progressive, secondary-progressive, and progressive-relapsing.

• Relapsing-remitting is the most prevalent course of MS.  This is characterized by defined acute episodes, between which a nearly full recovery is made.  At least 85% of MS cases at least begin as relapsing remitting.
• Primary-progressive MS accounts for about 10% of MS cases.  In this course, disability progresses from the onset of the disease, without the acute attacks or recovery periods present in relapsing-remitting MS.  Due to diagnostic criteria for primary-progessive MS, it is often not diagnosed until an individual is living with significant symptoms.
• Secondary-progressive MS is essentially a relapsing-remitting course of MS that shifts into a course that steadily progresses, but without the acute attacks.  According to some studies, about 50% of cases beginning as relapsing-remitting will become secondary-progressive within 10 years, and 90% will shift within 25 years.
• Progressive-relapsing MS is the least common course of the disease, affecting around 5% of patients.  This course is characterized by a steady progression of disability, punctuated with acute attacks.

Symptoms of MS vary from one patient to another.  There is very little you can depend on during the disease except for its unreliability.  This website lists a number of symptoms related to MS, but caveats that most people do not have all of the symptoms, and that many of the worse symptoms are those that appear near the end stages of the disease.  Some of the most common symptoms include: blurred or altered vision, numbness in the limbs, increased sensitivity to temperature, fatigure, dizziness or vertigo, bladder and bowel dysfunction, emotional changes, and sexual dysfunction (courtesy of the National MS Society website).

As of now, it is not known what causes MS, but scientists theorize that immunology, environment, genetics, and/or infection may play a part.  There are around 400,000 cases of MS in the United States alone, with worldwide cases numbering over 2 million.  Of these cases, the majority are women--MS is 2-3 times more common in females than in males--and most onsets occur between the ages of 20-50 years old.  For more information about who gets MS, please click here.

There is still no cure for MS, and some of the most commonly used treatments to slow the progression of the disease come with their own adverse side effects.  If you would like to know more about current treatments, Wikipedia has an article entitled "Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis" that lays out, and explains, treatments much better than I can hope to do.