What is Multiple Sclerosis?

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a life-long disease, another autoimmune disorder that affects the brain and spinal cord. The immune system attacks the myelin sheathing of neurons, damaging nerve cells responsible for sending messages from your brain to the rest of your body. It disrupts messages from the brain to produce symptoms such as muscle weakness, loss of vision, and difficulty walking, which causes issues with coordination and balance. Multiple sclerosis can sometimes cause problems with thinking or memory, depression, problems seeing or hearing, tingling or numbness in the extremities, fatigue, bladder dysfunction, sexual function issues, pain syndromes, including cramps and spasms.  If you’re experiencing MS, contact our garden city neurologist at LI Neuro! Schedule an appointment today!

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The disease is usually diagnosed in your twenties or thirties, with women three times more likely to be diagnosed than men. There is no known cure for multiple sclerosis yet, but treatments help manage the symptoms and slow down how fast it progresses. MS is one of the most common neurological disabilities in young adults. There are more than 400,000 people diagnosed with MS worldwide, and that number is on the rise as we learn more about environmental causes, which can trigger symptoms. 

The immune system is responsible for protecting our body from outside invaders, like infections and viruses. But in some people, there are rogue cells that attack the myelin sheaths of neurons. It’s still unknown why this happens, but it could be due to an environmental trigger, such as a virus or bacteria entering the body, which throws off the balance of good and bad cells. Some medications can slow down how fast MS progresses, but their effects lessen over time. There is also stem cell therapy being studied, but it’s still at least a decade away before there will be anything available to patients. 

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In conclusion, multiple sclerosis is a disease that damages the myelin sheaths of neurons in the brain and spinal cord. This disrupts messages from the brain to produce symptoms such as muscle weakness, loss of vision, and difficulty walking, which causes issues with coordination and balance. There is no known cure for this disease, but multiple treatments are available to help manage the symptoms and slow down how fast multiple sclerosis progresses. If you’re experiencing MS, contact our garden city neurologist at LI Neuro today! Click here to schedule an appointment!