Summary. Leg weakness can result from sciatica, spine conditions, neuromuscular disease, and certain medications. Sudden leg weakness may be a sign of stroke. Call 911 for any sudden muscle weakness, particularly if it occurs with facial drooping, severe headache, or slurred speech.
What causes weakness in legs? Leg weakness can be due to systemic disease, inflammatory conditions, or medication side effects. These causes can affect the nerves, spine, or brain, leading to leg weakness.
Muscle weakness due to vitamin D deficiency is predominantly of the proximal muscle groups and is manifested by a feeling of heaviness in the legs, tiring easily, and difficulty in mounting stairs and rising from a chair; the deficiency is reversible with supplementation (15–18).
Feeling weakness in one or both of your legs is called monoparesis or paraparesis and can be a direct result of MS. You can also feel weakness in your arms and other areas of your body, but to feel it in your legs often occurs more frequently.
People will often experience shaky or weak legs when dealing with vascular issues in the leg, like deep vein thrombosis or blood clots. Clots are very serious if untreated because they could break off into the bloodstream and travel to an artery in the lungs, blocking blood flow.
Legs can “give way” due to muscle issues, especially while exercising. These instances are not cause for alarm typically. But if your legs give way and you lose complete control or feeling, the spinal nerves are likely the culprit. The nerves in our spine help deliver signals from our brain to the legs.
Another common symptom of chronic anxiety is weakness in the muscles, most commonly experienced in the legs and sometimes the arms. During the fight or flight response, the body is preparing to take action against danger.
In fact, stress and chronic stress often cause heavy, tired, jelly-like, rubbery, weak, and stiff legs feelings because of how stress affects the body's muscles, including those in the legs.
Numbness of the face, body, or extremities (arms and legs) is often the first symptom experienced by those eventually diagnosed as having MS.
These are painful sensations that can affect the legs, feet, arms and hands and feel like burning, prickling, stabbing, ice cold or electrical sensations. They can interfere with daily activities, sleep and overall quality of life. Pruritis (itching) is a form of dysesthesias and may occur as a symptom of MS.
Age. Most people diagnosed with MS, are between the ages of 20 and 50 years old, although MS can develop at any age.
Early signs and symptoms of MS
tingling and numbness. pains and spasms. weakness or fatigue. balance problems or dizziness.
People should consider the diagnosis of MS if they have one or more of these symptoms: vision loss in one or both eyes. acute paralysis in the legs or along one side of the body. acute numbness and tingling in a limb.
While there is no definitive blood test for MS, blood tests can rule out other conditions that cause symptoms similar to those of MS, including lupus erythematosis, Sjogren's, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, some infections, and rare hereditary diseases.
Canadian research shows people with MS are more likely than the general population to visit a doctor or hospital in the years leading up to an MS diagnosis.
Cognitive changes: The most common cognitive changes related to MS tend to be things like slowed processing (when you need to read things a few times to let them sink in), difficulty finding words, loss of short-term memory, and multitasking problems.
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. Resolution is often complete.
Multiple sclerosis is caused by your immune system mistakenly attacking the brain and nerves. It's not clear why this happens but it may be a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
MS varies from patient to patient so that each individual has their own set of symptoms, problems, and their own course. There are people who have MS so mildly that they never even know that they have it.