People with MS can benefit from at least 30 minutes of physical activity at least three days a week.
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.
Research tells us exercise can help you manage multiple sclerosis symptoms, including fatigue, and problems with balance and walking. Exercising can also: improve your mood.
Many MS patients avoid exercise, thinking it will aggravate pain or make their fatigue worse. But research has shown that the opposite is true—exercise can actually improve symptoms, according to Diana Duda, PT, DPT, MSCS.
Quality sleep is important to maintaining overall health and wellness but sometimes it's hard to get. Lack of restful sleep can cause daytime drowsiness and make some MS symptoms feel worse. Sleep difficulties are actually more common in MS than in the general population.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) triggers that worsen symptoms or cause a relapse can include stress, heart disease and smoking.
According to current research and clinical practice, exercise does not cause MS episodes or exacerbations. However, many report an increase in symptoms approximately 30 minutes after exercise. This change in symptoms is not permanent and is not causing any damage.
For someone with MS , exercise that's too aggressive can bring on severe fatigue and injury and exacerbate symptoms.
It is now well documented that exercise does not cause MS exacerbations.
The term highly active MS has not been precisely defined but the most important features include frequent relapses with incomplete recovery, and/or high radiological burden of disease, rapid accrual of disability after disease onset, with otherwise typical features of MS.
Most symptoms develop abruptly, within hours or days. These attacks or relapses of MS typically reach their peak within a few days at most and then resolve slowly over the next several days or weeks so that a typical relapse will be symptomatic for about eight weeks from onset to recovery.
Research suggests that as many as 4 in 5 people with MS have some degree of ataxia, the lack of voluntary coordination of muscle movements. Ataxia can cause balance problems and result in an unsteady gait that may resemble clumsiness or drunkenness.
Disease Course of MS Is Unpredictable
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.
Outlook. The outlook for benign MS isn't clear. Some people who are diagnosed with it never go on to have a more serious disease progression, while others do. Remember, just because you have mild symptoms when you're first diagnosed with MS doesn't mean that they'll stay that way.
Over time, more than two-thirds of people remain able to walk, although they may need an ambulation aid such as a cane or walker to do so. Some may choose to use a motorized scooter or wheelchair for long distances, in order to conserve energy and remain more active; others may need to use a wheelchair all the time.
There's even some evidence that strength training might help slow MS damage in the brain. An exercise program for MS includes 150 minutes of "aerobics" each week. These are activities that get your heart pumping, like walking or swimming. Work out at your own pace and level.
Experiencing some low-level stress isn't always bad for you, but long-term or excessive stress can affect your health. It may make your symptoms of MS, such as pain, fatigue and depression, seem worse. Learning to manage your stress is an important part of taking control of your condition.
But without regular activity, we become sedentary, which can increase weakness and fatigue symptoms that cause additional health issues. Our lives can become a vicious cycle of MS symptoms competing with the desire and the need to be active.
Currently, there is no cure for Multiple Sclerosis (MS). However, in the past 20 years, significant advancements have been made in MS research, resulting in over a dozen licensed treatments, particularly for those with relapsing MS or early active progressive MS.
There's some evidence that systemic infection (viral or bacterial), postpartum period, stress, and assisted reproduction (infertility treatment) can be associated with a flare-up. That can lead to more brain cell damage and demyelination. MS flare-ups are different from pseudo-flares.
Some people with MS may have only mild symptoms. Others may lose their ability to see clearly, write, speak, or walk when communication between the brain and other parts of the body becomes disrupted. Myelin is the fatty tissue that surrounds and protects nerve fibers. In MS, the myelin is destroyed in many areas.