ms nerve damage

What is Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple Sclerosis is classified as an autoimmune disorder, where the body attacks itself as if it is a foreign invader that the body needs to defend itself against. Sclerosis is another name for the scarring that appears in the majority of the cases of  Multiple Sclerosis. The most common way of diagnosing Multiple Sclerosis is through ms mri tests or magnetic resonance imaging tests, where the person's whole body can be scanned to determine if there is scarring or demyelination on the spinal cord or throughout the brain.

Multiple Sclerosis nerve damage

Multiple Sclerosis attacks the nerves through out the body and scaring or demyelination results. In more severe cases of MS nerve damage can result.  The more severe MS nerve damage becomes, the more this can result in many more problems with severely reducing how well  different parts of the body can function body to function, often on a daily basis.

Based on what the doctors told me, after I was first diagnosed with a severe case of Multiple Sclerosis, the symptoms of ms nerve damage, which are often seen in more severe cases of MS, which can be signs of ms nerve damage being present can include any of the following:

* foot drop or clonus - this describes the loss of control of one or both of your feet or a loss of nerve function in one or both of the feet (this can result in ms numbness, ms foot pain, ms nerve pain, and turning of the foot sideways whenever you try to take a step or stand with your feet flat on the floor of clonus).

* loss of muscle strength in the legs or feet - this can result in problems picking one or both feet or of either of the legs, loss of balance, 

* loss of nerve function in the legs - this can result in losing the ability to stand or walk.

* loss of hand control  - this can happen to one or both hands and is a loss of fine finger movement or dexterity, loss of the ability to write or loss of the ability to use a fork or a spoon to feed yourself.

* loss of muscle strength in the arms or hands - this often means that anything that you can pick up, you drop on the floor, or difficulty in picking up things off of the floor, table, etc. that you could do before the lack of muscle strength occurred.

If the ms nerve damage ends up focusing on the brain, resulting in ms brain scarring or ms brain lesions, then a whole other set of severe ms symptoms can occur.

Because the brain is the master controller for the body, the more severe the brain scarring or the more ms brain lesions are present, then more different parts of the body and how well we can function are much more noticeably affected.  The more severe MS scarring in the brain can result in some or most of the following ms symptoms, including:

* cognitive problems - problems forming sentences or completing a thought, problems following logical though (including problems figuring things out that you were able to do before)

 * memory problems - severe loss of long term and short term memory

* loss of the ability to stand or walk -- this can be a result of either scarring in the brain or scarring along the spinal cord because of the damage to the myelin sheath along the spinal cord.

* speech problems - can be severe enough that speech therapy is needed to regain the ability to speak agin.

* hearing problems - hearing can be affected where partial loss of hearing, tinnitus (ringing in the ears) or maybe even total loss of hearing

* vision problems - difficulty focusing or dimness of vision may show up initially, but it scarring on the retinal nerve or throughout the parts of the brain that aids in our ability to see has more lesions or scarring, partial or total loss of vision in one or both eyes can result.

As in the case of the type of intense physical therapy and MS exercises can be used to help retrain the body to function again, even in the case of the more severe cases of MS that do involve varying degrees of ms nerve damage.

This gives us some hope that there may be something that can help even those of us that have become more severely disabled because of the nerve damage that can result from MS attacks on the central nervous system -- even if we end up not being able to walk for a period of time -- that there may be ways for us to regain what we have lost because of MS attacking our bodies.