Today when people mention anything the first thing you usually hear out of their mouths is about someone famous . Well as I was doing research for MS I stumbled upon a web site with famous people who have MS:Montel Williams, Richard Pryor, Alan Osmond, Annette Funicello. There are more but then I would be completely avoiding the point of this. What is MS?.
Multiple Sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system. It's a very unpredictable condition. Some people with MS may only feel mild symptoms while others could lose the ability to write, speak or walk. It is a disease of the "White Matter" tissue. The white matter tissue is made up of nerve fibers which are responsible for transmitting communication signals. People affected by MS have patches of damage called lesions which appear in random areas of the white matter. At the site of a lesion myelin is lost. Ms, is a hard condition to characterize. As I've said before the type and severity of symptoms can greatly vary. There are four main types of MS: Relapsing/Remitting, Secondary Progressive, Progressive Relapsing Multiple Sclerosis and Primary Progressive.
Diagnosing MS is extremely hard. Mostly because no one is even sure that MS is one disease. So there isn't a certain test for it. Usually getting an MS diagnosis is a process of elimination, making sure there are absolutely no possibilities of it being something else. The process is usually drawn out over months or years. Some of the tests include: Gait and coordination, which is where a neurologist evaluates ataxia in varoius part s of the body by observing the patient walking normally, walking heel to toe and finger to nose tests. Heel/Shin test: test for ataxia and cerebellar dysunction. You have to bring the ball of your heel onto the knee of your leg and then move it down the shin. Babinkski's sign: a test for signs of disease process in the motor neurons.
Some of the symptoms for MS include: Hearing loss, double vision, jerky eye movements, lack of coordination between the two eyes, paralysis, loss of muscle tone, slurred speech, partial numbness, complete numbness, loss of awareness of location of body parts, facial pain.
