Getting help at home with MS can greatly improve an individual’s quality of life. Managing physical tasks and help with mobility issues are often required, as well as helping deal with the emotional and cognitive difficulties.
What is MS?
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a condition that affects nerves in your central nervous system. That’s your brain and spinal cord. In MS, the coating (called myelin) that protects your nerves is damaged. This causes a range of symptoms like blurred vision and problems with how we move, think and feel.
Once diagnosed, MS stays with you for life, but treatments and specialists can help you to manage the condition and its symptoms.
More than 150,000 people in the UK have MS. In the UK people are most likely to find out they have MS in their thirties and forties. But the first signs of MS often start years earlier. Many people notice their first symptoms years before they get their diagnosis.
MS affects about two and half times as many women as men. People from many different ethnic backgrounds can get MS.
What happens when you have MS?
You can’t catch MS from someone. You get it when your immune system isn’t working properly. In MS your immune system attacks the nerves in your brain and spinal cord by mistake.
To understand what happens in multiple sclerosis, it’s useful to understand a little bit about the immune system and what happens in the central nervous system.
In the central nervous system, a fatty substance called myelin protects the nerve fibres. Myelin helps messages travel quickly and smoothly along the nerves in your brain, spinal cord and optic nerve (between your eye and your brain).
Your immune system fights off infections. But in MS it mistakes myelin for something that shouldn’t be there, so attacks it. It damages the myelin, stripping it off the nerve fibres. This leaves scars known as lesions or plaques.
This damage disrupts messages travelling along nerve fibres. They can slow down, become distorted, or not get through at all. As well as losing the myelin, there can sometimes be damage to the actual nerve fibres too. Nerve damage can cause more lasting symptoms over time.
What causes MS symptoms?
The central nervous system controls everything your body does. So multiple sclerosis can cause many different types of symptoms. Different symptoms can happen depending on which part of your central nervous system has been affected.
Symptoms could be problems with your:
But MS is different for everyone.
What is relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis?
Relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis is a type of MS where you have relapses (symptoms getting worse) followed by recovery (that’s when it’s “remitting”).
In relapsing MS, people have distinct attacks or ‘relapses’. New symptoms will suddenly appear, or old ones will come back or get worse. But then these symptoms will either mostly or completely go away again.
If you don’t get diagnosed with this type of MS, you might get a diagnosis instead of two other types of MS: primary progressive MS or secondary progressive MS.
Once you get a diagnosis of MS, it stays with you for life. But treatments and specialists can help you to manage your MS and its symptoms. We’re here to help you live well with your MS and fund research to stop MS for good.
How common is multiple sclerosis?
We estimate there are over 150,000 people with MS in the UK, and each year over 7,000 people are newly diagnosed.
This means around 1 in every 400 people in the UK lives with MS, and each week around 135 people are diagnosed with MS.
In the UK people are most likely to find out they have MS in their thirties and forties. But the first signs of MS often start years earlier.
Facts about multiple sclerosis
Multiple sclerosis is a ‘neurological’ condition, meaning it affects your nerves.
‘Sclerosis’ means scarring and refers to the scars (also called lesions or plaques) that MS causes in your brain or spinal cord. These show up in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. It’s ‘multiple’ sclerosis because the lesions happen in more than one place and at more than one time.
Everyone’s MS is different. People can have different symptoms which come and go or continue in different ways.
Relapsing remitting MS (RRMS) is the most common type of MS. Around 85% of people with multiple
Motor Neurone Disease
Caring for people with progressive conditions like MND is challenging, with the management of physical tasks like personal care, and addressing difficulties with communication, swallowing, and feeding. Our services can help families cope with the ongoing and changing demands they experience.