Advance Warnings Of Multiple Sclerosis (15-Year Timeline!)

There’s a lot of mystery to multiple sclerosis (MS). We don’t know what causes it. We don’t know how it happens. We don’t know how it can be fixed.

We do know approximately what it is, though; it’s not a “the doctors are half-sure the patient is making it up” thing. In MS, we know it’s an autoimmune condition, and that it degrades the myelination of nerves. We don’t know the mechanism of how the autoimmune condition actually degrades the myelin, but we see specific markers of chronic inflammation and we see myelin withering away, so we’re pretty sure the former leads to the latter somehow.

Another thing we know: we do know what heralds its coming! We wrote about that before, here: Five Advance Warnings of Multiple Sclerosis

If you don’t want to click through, we’ll not keep the 5 signs a secret, they are:

1. depression
2. sexual disorders
3. constipation
4. cystitis
5. urinary tract infections

And indeed:

❝This association was sufficiently robust at the statistical level for us to state that these are early clinical warning signs, probably related to damage to the nervous system, in patients who will later be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The overrepresentation of these symptoms persisted and even increased over the five years after diagnosis.❞

~ Dr. Céline Louapre

But now there’s more: we have a timeline!

A plucky band of researchers (Dr. Marta Ruiz-Algueró et al.) looked at thousands of patients with (n=2,038) and without (n=10,182) MS, and looked at their medical histories over 25 years prior to the onset of clinical symptoms of MS (e.g., the characteristic demyelination of nerves).

They found some surprisingly clear patterns, and the timeline looks like this:

• 15 years before: increased visits to general practitioners for fatigue, pain, dizziness, and mental health concerns.
• 12 years before: increased psychiatrist visits.
• 8–9 years before: increased visits to neurologists and ophthalmologists (especially: blurry vision, eye pain).
• 3–5 years before: rise in emergency medicine and radiology visits.
• 1 year before: peak in physician visits across multiple specialties.

You may be wondering: where are the UTIs, constipation, etc from the other study? The answer is they are in the last few years, and come under the umbrella terms mentioned.

In short, there is a long, complex prodromal period (much longer and more complex than previously known) where early signs, often initially mental health-related, emerge before the disease’s clear neurological symptoms. This is interesting, because prodromal phases are also seen in Parkinson’s disease, which as the researchers suggested, might reflect a similar progression pattern (or it might not—that research is yet to be done).

You can read the paper in full, here: Health Care Use Before Multiple Sclerosis Symptom Onset

So, forewarned is fore-armed, as they say. On which note…

Is there anything that can be done?

Yes! While there is as yet no known cure, it is—per the case study of Dr. Saray Stancic—possible to at least become mostly symptom-free, which is a big win:

❝Dr. Saray Stancic is another from the ranks of “doctors who got a serious illness and it completely changed how they view the treatment of serious illness”.

In her case, Stancic was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and wasn’t impressed with the results from the treatments offered, so (after 8 years of pain, suffering, and many medications, only for her condition to worsen) she set about doing better with an evidence-based lifestyle medicine approach.

After 7 years of her new approach, she would go on to successfully run a marathon and live symptom-free.

All this to say: her approach isn’t a magic quick fix, but it is a serious method for serious results, and after all, while it’d be nice to be magically in perfect health tomorrow, what’s important is being in good health for life, right?❞

You can read all about what she did and how to do it, here: Lifestyle vs Multiple Sclerosis & More ← the “and more” is because the same model can be applied to quite a number of other conditions too 😎

Take care!