Initial Symptoms Of Multiple Sclerosis

The principal dilemma in current management of the disease multiple sclerosis is that while early diagnosis enables damage-sparing treatment to begin, diagnosing multiple sclerosis too early increases the likelihood of treating people who do not actually have the disease. Current medicines for disease-modification are all given by injection and cost about $14,000 per year. Apart from being difficult and expensive, there is some risk of harm from them which, if the patient does not actually have multiple sclerosis disease, occurs without any offsetting benefit.

The dilemma would not be serious if multiple sclerosis disease was easy to diagnose, but unfortunately multiple sclerosis is among the most difficult diagnoses in all of medicine to make, at least while still in its early stages. Early symptoms of multiple sclerosis can resemble other conditions; moreover, other conditions can resemble multiple sclerosis. Affecting around 2.5 million people in many places, multiple sclerosis is not exactly a rare disease. It badly affects women at least twice as often as men and begins early in adulthood with most cases starting between the ages of 20 and 40.

Multiple sclerosis is actually a so-called autoimmune disease, meaning that a person's immune system, ordinarily useful and essential in fighting off infections, becomes overactive and attacks the individual's own bodily tissues. Rheumatoid arthritis disease is another example of an autoimmune disease, but in multiple sclerosis the immune attack is not directed against joints as it is in rheumatoid arthritis. The immune system, instead, attacks large clusters of nerve-fibers generally deep within the central nervous system which includes the brain and spinal cord.

These types of attacks can produce a wide variety of diseased symptoms depending on what the usual function was of the nerve-fibers that are under attack. When the affected nerve-fibers have to do with vision, the symptoms are visual, like loss of visual clarity or even doubling of vision. When the diseased nerve-fibers are involved with the process of bodily sensation, then the symptoms can be numbness or tingling. The ocular or sensory symptoms are the most common initial symptoms in multiple sclerosis. But early symptoms might instead consist of dizziness, weakness, clumsiness or difficulty with urination. The sheer diversity of early symptoms of the disease that can be due to multiple sclerosis is one of the chief difficulties in recognizing it for what it is and properly diagnosing it.

It is greatly useful in this regard to consider the double issues of false-positives and false-negatives. Most of the medical test and every diagnosis are subject to these types of errors. False-positive clinically means that a test or a doctor indicates that a disease is present when it is, in fact, absent. A false-negative error takes place when a test or a doctor indicates that a disease is absent when it is, in fact, present. Despite the increased self-assurance that expanding medical knowledge and ever-more sophisticated tests provide, false-positives and false-negatives are a fact of life and still apply to every test and every diagnosis. In the disease multiple sclerosis there are three cornerstones to the diagnostic process. In usual descending order of significance they are the clinical evaluation, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning and examination of the cerebrospinal fluid.