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Advice needed for a sufferer of multiple sclerosis
I have recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis but I don’t have an appointment to see a neurologist for months. I was on the drug prednisilone but have now stopped. I feel exhausted all the time. Any tips?
The disease itself – its patterns of development and progress – and the general presentations in different individuals and age groups are far too complicated to outline in this space. The possible neurological signs and symptoms of MS can be so diverse that doctors may easily miss the diagnosis when the first symptoms appear. While the disease often becomes worse over time, affected people usually have periods of relatively good health (remissions), alternating with some flare-ups. As the disease is basically an inflammatory one, steroids (which are anti-inflammatory drugs) are a great help in the stages of exacerbation.
The disease mostly affects young adults. The cause, as I am sure you will have been told, is unknown, but a likely explanation is that a virus or some unknown antigen triggers a process, usually early in life, that makes the body produce antibodies against its own tissues (the covering of the nerves). For some reason, the antibodies provoke inflammation and damage to these nerve sheaths. Hence the symptoms and signs develop which make up the MS disease.
Heredity seems to have a role in MS; about 5 per cent of the people with the disease have a brother or sister who is affected, and about 15 per cent have a close relative that is affected. (An interesting feature indicates that environment also plays a role: the climate in which a person spent the first decade of life appears to be more important than that in later years – MS almost never occurs in people who grow up near the equator.)
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