"It is so tough to get diagnosed. I had weird symptoms that no one doctor understood. I thought I was going crazy." – writes a patient with Multiple Sclerosis.

Quiz: Multiple sclerosis

Wireless Multiple sclerosis quiz

Well, the disease is really devastating when it is in advanced stage.

And that’s the real pity to see a young patient affected. Being in med school I was writing Student Medical Histories. Neurology rotations required to draw the chart of the human, where you pinpoint and mark the level of Neurological lesions.
You know, this is one of the beauties of Neurology – just talking to a patient and performing physical exam allows you to find the point of damage without even performing any high-tech stuff like MRI or CT. However, the bad part of story is that really very few neurological disorders can be completely cured.

Some say that neural cells never recover. They do. Some recent studies found stem neural cells, which supposedly can repair damaged areas. And a damaged nerve grows back though slowly – 1 mm a day at best. However, none of these facts really help people with massive damages. It does not look that own stem cells really repair our brain well – people stay paralyzed and crippled for years. Maybe those stem cells help mice in lab, but in clinics that’s still more fantasy than reality, though there were reports of neuron transplants (and at a time I did some research in a Neurosurgery lab where we implanted fetal cells into the rat’s brain to treat Parkinsonism). I saw paralyzed people with bed sores. Pity picture. So, the conventional wisdom that brain cells are not replenished probably still holds.  Though, in experiments there is some ability for nervous regeneration.

Anyway, that time in med school I got to follow the history of patient with Multiple sclerosis. That was really not so pleasant to see young guy, younger than me, younger than 20 years, who is blind on one eye, has a paralyzed leg and unsteady gait. I marked all the lesions I found on the scheme and it was OK. What wasn’t OK I felt I wouldn’t be able to help him much. He actually did not look upset (which struck me), he was very lively, smiling and cooperating and looked like he used to his condition – that periodically something goes wrong – blind eye or non-working arm. Reading the books, I knew that the prognosis was not really great for him.

Yet, when multiple sclerosis begins suddenly with blurred vision or paralysis, doctors can recognize it easily. However, often in the beginning the symptoms vague. There is a discrepancy between what doctors see and what patient experience. Even worse – family suspects that a patient fakes his symptoms.

Commonly multiple sclerosis is relapsing-remitting - flare-ups go after remission. Sometime symptoms worsen quickly - progressive MS. About half of the patients go to progressive multiple sclerosis after 10 years.

Multiple sclerosis is not really common disorder, but it is one of the tough ones.

To learn more about Multiple Sclerosis, take the quiz:

Multiple sclerosis

Wireless Multiple sclerosis quiz

Trackback 

Site Tags:

neurology multiple sclerosis neuro transplant blind leison Psych neural interferon myelin paralysis vision+loss Medicine neurology swell swelling pain surgery brain psycho delusion hallucinations psychotic depression mood infarction unexplained immunity virus brain health+research, drug trial clinical FDA research protocol symptom+checker medication phase diagnose+me medication+withdrawl placebo diagnose treatment health+care, medical, tip, tips, problem, challenge, disease, symptom, treatment, diagnosis, diagnose

Bookmark Article