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UK Charity No 1131517
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UK Charity
No 1131517
Multiple Sclerosis
It is important to remember that MS is only one part of a person and not the person.
MS does not represent them, it is not their identity, they are as normal as the next person.
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Who Gets MS?
Being diagnosed with a disease that has no known cause or cure can be very traumatic for some people. Nearly all diseases have a cause or causes, infection, trauma, degenerative, tumours, and so on. All of the known causes of disease have been researched as a possible reason to the strange and so far unanswerable complexity of MS.
Many will experience their first MS symptoms between the ages of 20 to 40 years, however the disease has been diagnosed as early as 5 yrs of age and as late as 60 + years of age.
Generally a female will experience MS at a younger age then males, particularly during their menstrual years. MS affects females two to three more than males in these early years. In later years the incident rate between males and females is almost equal.
Males are more likely than females to develop primary progressive MS, although the difference in numbers is small, females appear to experience more relapses.
A family history of multiple sclerosis can create a 2 -
The severity of the disease varies greatly from person to person and the path it follows is unpredictable, however only a small percentage of MS people will experience severe disability.
Life expectancy of MS people, with a few exceptions, is nearly the same as that of the unaffected population [1].
Multiple Sclerosis is more likely to occur in Caucasians than in any other group. The disease is rarer amongst those with an Asian, African and Hispanic background, although the incidence rate across these groups appears to be rising. Whether this is due to genetics, environmental factors, and dietary factors and so on is yet to be understood.
It is difficult to know how many people world wide have MS – the figures presented from country to country vary to such an extent that there may be anywhere from
1.1 million to 4.5 million MS people worldwide.
Some of the factors that influence the distribution of MS across the world
- 1) Age
- 2) Ethnic Background
- 3) Gender
- 4) Genetics
- 5) Location (Geography)
1. Weinshenker BG (1994). "Natural history of multiple sclerosis". Ann. Neurol. 36 Suppl: S6–11