Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis

what are the symptoms of multiple sclerosis well they're a whole variety of symptoms that can affect people with MS of course some are more common than others and symptoms generally occur in the setting of what we call attacks or relapses or exacerbations so the very first symptom in people with MS that's the most common are sensory symptoms these are this is numbness or tingling in some part of the body now everybody gets numbness or tingling if you hit your funny bone or you cross your legs too long and that's the same kind of feeling that a person with MS might get but in that person it happens spontaneously and it lasts for a much longer time typically typically days another very common fairly early symptom is optic neuritis this is an inflammation in the nerve that controls vision so people typically get a hole in their in their field of vision they get pain on eye movement and they may have some other defect in their field field of vision in one eye other symptoms that are fairly common are motor symptoms so that can be weakness in one arm or one leg sometimes both legs in coordination or clumsiness in a limb double vision dizziness or vertigo those are among the the more common obvious neurological symptoms and then there are certain symptoms in people with MS that we regard as sort of silent symptoms or invisible symptoms would be a better way to determine that because we as neurologists can't see this in a patient and one of the most common of those symptoms is fatigue and this is one of the probably three most common symptoms and people with MS and it's not the kind of fatigue that a person gets when they just haven't had a good night's sleep they're brewing up a little bit too long it's really an overall sense of innervation it's as if you just can't go on and do the kinds of activities that an ordinary person would want to do and it's a very mysterious but common symptom an MS for which we don't clearly have an explanation there's some other things that happen in people with MS depression is very common in people with MS about half of the population of people with MS will experience a significant bout of during their lifetime we don't know whether this is directly related to the areas of abnormality in the brain that are caused by MS or some other factor a lot of patients with MS complain that they that their thinking isn't as keen as it was when they were younger and this can be memory impairment it can be trouble focusing and concentrating trouble multitasking it usually doesn't result in very profound impairment of cognitive function but it is a very common complaint how about pain pain is an under-recognized symptom of MS and it too is extremely common and it can occur in a variety of types some patients with MS develop what we refer to as paroxysmal pains these are jabs of pain one common sight is in the face what we call trigeminal neuralgia so these are like lightning like jabs of very severe pain and that can occur in other areas of the body other types of neuralgic pain and then there are a lot of patients that get a burning kind of pain which is a manifestation of one of the sensory symptoms so these are people that typically will have numbness and tingling but often it takes on a more persistent painful burning quality and finally there are patients with MS who just have significant aches and pains in limbs some of that might be related to spasticity or stiffness in the limbs which is a common manifestation of MS and other people it's a result of abnormal postures a lot of people with MS have trouble walking and one of my mentors once told me that MS disables patients in three ways because of gait impairment walking trouble because of fatigue and because of difficulty with bladder function so as a result of abnormal postures in gait a lot of people develop secondary tissue injuries spine problems for example low back pain so if if I develop pain in the right lower part of my ab and I push on it it's tender good chance that that's going to be appendicitis what symptom tells me that I have MS well you're right that you better not come see your neurologist for that for that problem but so again typically with MS pain you will not have local tenderness to the touch or tenderness on pressure you'll have a spontaneous pain the distribution is typically in a in the in a neurological pattern rather than where you might expect pain from a specific organ dysfunction like the liver or the or the appendix or or heartburn things like that you know there is a tendency for people with MS to think that everything that happens to them is from MS and MS is enough trouble for somebody to bear but it unfortunately doesn't protect the person from getting other kinds of disorders so I tell patients you know let us know if you have any symptom that persists but often you'll need to see your primary care doctor right but you've given a long list of symptoms of things that can occur in patients with MS and people can look up on the internet and look that up numbness tingling such as or any of them characteristic only of MS that if you have it you say oh my goodness I must have MS I would say there's almost no symptom that is absolutely characteristic of MS and and the doctor diagnosing MS has to put together the history the neurological examination and get some help from some other studies such as imaging and how about the timeframe you alluded to this earlier in terms of how long the symptoms should last before you would even consider this a possibility right as a general rule when people have attacks of MS they tend to last 24 hours or longer so if you get a bout of numbness the less a few minutes that's highly unlikely to be due to MS the exception being these paroxysmal symptoms so when these like jabs of pain recur multiple times over a series of days even though each individual jab is very brief that can be a of MS

Channel: Animated Multiple Sclerosis Patient

Views: 75,353

Keywords: Experts Module 1, Multiple Sclerosis (Disease Or Medical Condition), Symptoms, Fatigue, Numbness, Depression, Memory loss, Multiple Sclerosis Signs And Symptoms, MS

Id: if9x2gP4bM4

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2014