As many as 10 percent of people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience nausea or an upset stomach. This symptom can be accompanied by feelings of dizziness, hot flashes, vomiting, and more. If you are experiencing nausea and wondering if it's related to MS, talk to your doctor.
You're more likely to catch a cold or flu virus if you have MS, especially if you take certain medicines that curb your immune system -- your body's defense against germs. And when you get sick with the flu, your MS raises the chances of health problems that may need treatment at your doctor's office or a hospital.
Summary. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease of the central nervous system that can affect the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. Common symptoms include fatigue, bladder and bowel problems, sexual problems, pain, cognitive and mood changes such as depression, muscular changes and visual changes.
Altered sensations are fairly common in multiple sclerosis. You might feel pins and needles, burning or crawling sensations, numbness or tightness. These unusual sensations are a type of nerve (neuropathic) pain.
“MS pain that commonly interferes with sleep is neuropathic pain — often described as burning, shooting, searing, or deeply aching. This pain can be relentless and is often worse at night.” Musculoskeletal pain can occur from a compensatory gait pattern (due to leg weakness or foot drop).
These include fibromyalgia and vitamin B12 deficiency, muscular dystrophy (MD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), migraine, hypo-thyroidism, hypertension, Beçhets, Arnold-Chiari deformity, and mitochondrial disorders, although your neurologist can usually rule them out quite easily.
Up to 30 percent of people with MS report having indigestion symptoms, compared to 8 percent of the general population. Many people with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience gastroparesis, a feeling of fullness, nausea, vomiting, or abdominal pain shortly after consuming food.
Migraines are one of the most common mimicker diseases that can be misdiagnosed for MS. Migraine causes intense throbbing headaches, light sensitivity, and nausea. Many migraine sufferers have also experienced blurred vision similar to the kind caused by optic neuritis in MS patients.
Some conditions that doctors may commonly misdiagnose as MS include migraine, RIS, spondylopathy, and neuropathy. To accurately diagnose MS, doctors must rule out conditions with similar symptoms and look for signs and symptoms specific to MS. As such, the process of diagnosing MS may be lengthy and complex.
You may have a single symptom, and then go months or years without any others. A problem can also happen just one time, go away, and never return. For some people, the symptoms get worse within weeks or months. Documentation of a progressive course requires at least six months of observation by a doctor.
But if part of the brain or spinal cord has been damaged by MS, the nerve cells in that area will die off faster than the areas around it that are normal. This happens very slowly, usually over decades and typically shows up as gradual walking difficulty happening over several years.
As expected fatigue was a significant symptom for the people with MS in the studies included, it was commonly experienced and often affected those people severely. Daytime sleepiness was observed less often than fatigue and was usually less severe, but it had a significant impact on the people it did affect.
Can I have multiple sclerosis for years and not know it? Yes. MS can go undetected for years. Research has suggested that many patients experience MS-related symptoms and signs several years before receiving a definite diagnosis of the disease.
An MRI scan can detect MS activity early on , sometimes before an individual experiences any worsening symptoms.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) triggers that worsen symptoms or cause a relapse can include stress, heart disease and smoking. While some are easier to avoid than others, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and overall health and wellness can have outsized benefits for MS patients.
A recent study of 5,300 people with MS found that more than half of participants reported fatigue, tingling and numbness, cognitive issues, muscular weakness, pain, and depression.
Fatigue in MS is not just an ordinary tiredness, like you might get at the end of a hard day's work. People describe it as an overwhelming sense of tiredness with no obvious cause. You may wake up feeling as tired as you did when you went to sleep.
Early MS symptoms may include blurred vision, numbness, dizziness, muscle weakness, and coordination issues. MS is progressive and can worsen over time. Eventually, the disease can do damage directly to the nerves, causing permanent disability.
Here's where MS (typically) starts
Although a number of MS symptoms can appear early on, two stand out as occurring more often than others: Optic neuritis, or inflammation of the optic nerve, is usually the most common, Shoemaker says. You may experience eye pain, blurred vision and headache.
Blood Tests: Currently, there are no definitive blood tests for diagnosing MS, but they can be used to rule out other conditions that may mimic MS symptoms, including Lyme disease, collagen-vascular diseases, rare hereditary disorders and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).