Can stress make MS symptoms feel worse? Many people with MS say “yes.” They experience more symptoms during stressful times. When the stress abates, their symptoms seem less troubling or less severe. This could be understood by looking at the stress and coping process.
However, long-term or excessive stress can affect your health and may make the symptoms of MS seem worse. Learning to manage your stress in such a way that it does not make life with MS worse is an important part of taking control of your condition.
Stress Impacts All Health Conditions, Including MS
A meta-analysis published in Health Psychology Open evaluated how stress impacts MS and found some evidence that stress can be associated with relapses. The authors also found evidence that MS relapses and stress can have a bidirectional relationship.
MS Inflammation and Stress
Stress has long been associated with MS exacerbations. It isn't completely clear whether stress actually causes exacerbations, or whether you may become more anxious than usual because of the physical changes that occur before an exacerbation has its peak impact.
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.
MS relapses are caused when your immune system attacks the protective covering (called myelin) around nerves in your brain and spinal cord. These attacks damage the myelin. Inflammation around the nerves is the sign of an attack.
Anxiety is perhaps the most taxing and under-treated psychological effect of living with MS. Researchers suspect that anxiety in MS results from both the disease process, causing changes within the brain, in combination with social consequences and uncertainties associated with living with MS.
A number of methods can calm things down. Exercises include breathing, muscle and mind relaxation, and relaxation to music. Whichever you try, first make sure you have a: Quiet location that's free of distractions.
True flares can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or months, per the NMSS. It is not always clear from the outset whether a person is experiencing a flare or a pseudoexacerbation, and sometimes watching and waiting is the only way to know.
People with MS can benefit from at least 30 minutes of physical activity at least three days a week. For someone with MS , exercise that's too aggressive can bring on severe fatigue and injury and exacerbate symptoms.
People with MS (pwMS) have long reported that psychological stress can worsen their symptoms; indeed, it has been demonstrated that exposure to a wide range of challenging life events is correlated with the worsening of neurological symptoms [2], increased lesion burden on the brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [3] ...
Contents. You may have to adapt your daily life if you're diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), but with the right care and support many people can lead long, active and healthy lives.
Depression, persistent anxiety and extreme irritability are not natural or inevitable, even in people with MS. However, they are very common. These changes require treatment just like any of the physical symptoms of the disease; mood changes can be a significant source of pain and distress in and of themselves.
Commonly cited MS personality changes include social inappropriateness, disinhibition, apathy, emotional lability, and impulsivity.
While many with MS will experience depression or anxiety at some point, more rarely, some people experience changes to their emotions or behaviour that don't seem to make sense, or that they aren't able to control.
In conclusion, it appears that drinking a moderate amount of caffeine shouldn't have any ill-effect on people with MS.
Alcohol's Effect on MS Symptoms
Even one drink can make issues like unsteadiness worse. “If you have a lot of trouble with balance, thinking, or memory symptoms from MS, it may be better to avoid alcohol altogether,” says Graves. Alcohol can also lead to sleep problems and worsen bladder symptoms.
Those symptoms include loss of vision in an eye, loss of power in an arm or leg or a rising sense of numbness in the legs. Other common symptoms associated with MS include spasms, fatigue, depression, incontinence issues, sexual dysfunction, and walking difficulties.
A person with benign MS will have few symptoms or loss of ability after having MS for about 15 years, while most people with MS would be expected to have some degree of disability after that amount of time, particularly if their MS went untreated.