Multiple Sclerosis

By Melissa Abramovitz

Multiple Sclerosis is a disease in which the immune system eats away at the protective sheath covering the nerves, interfering with the communication between the brain and the body. This book explains who gets the disorder and why, and how it affects the body. Diagnosis and current treatment options are discussed, as well as living with the disease. With full-color photographs and illustrations, this book offers the latest statistics along with information on new treatments, drugs, and future research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosen Publishing
• Release date: Aug 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781420505436

Melissa Abramovitz

Melissa Abramovitz lives in Roseville, California, and writes nonfiction books for all age groups. She is the author of hundreds of magazine articles, more than 40 educational books for children and teenagers, numerous poems and short stories, and several children’s picture books. She has a degree in psychology from the University of California San Diego and is a graduate of the Institute of Children’s Literature. Visit her online at www.melissaabramovitz.com.

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© 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Abramovitz, Melissa, 1954-Multiple sclerosis / by Melissa Abramovitz.

p. cm.-- (Diseases & disorders)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4205-0287-9 (hardcover)

1. Multiple sclerosis--Popular works. I. Title.

RC377.A273 2010 616.8’34--dc22

2010012810

Lucent Books 27500 Drake Rd. 

Farmington Hills, MI 48331

ISBN-13: 978-1-4205-0287-9

ISBN-10: 1-4205-0287-5

Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 14 13 12 11 10

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

An Unpredictable and Incurable Disease

Chapter 1

What Is Multiple Sclerosis?

Chapter 2

What Causes Multiple Sclerosis?

Chapter 3

How Is Multiple Sclerosis Treated?

Chapter 4

Living with Multiple Sclerosis

Chapter 5

The Future

Notes

Glossary

Organizations to Contact

For More Information

Index

Picture Credits

About the Author

FOREWORD

The Most Difficult Puzzles Ever Devised

Charles Best, one of the pioneers in the search for a cure for diabetes, once explained what it is about medical research that intrigued him so. It’s not just the gratification of knowing one is helping people, he confided, although that probably is a more heroic and selfless motivation. Those feelings may enter in, but truly, what I find best is the feeling of going toe to toe with nature, of trying to solve the most difficult puzzles ever devised. The answers are there somewhere, those keys that will solve the puzzle and make the patient well. But how will those keys be found?

Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has so puzzled people— and often frightened them, as well—as the onset of illness in a body or mind that had seemed healthy before. A seizure, the inability of a heart to pump, the sudden deterioration of muscle tone in a small child—being unable to reverse such conditions or even to understand why they occur was unspeakably frustrating to healers. Even before there were names for such conditions, even before they were understood at all, each was a reminder of how complex the human body was, and how vulnerable.

While our grappling with understanding diseases has been frustrating at times, it has also provided some of humankind’s most heroic accomplishments. Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery in 1928 of a mold that could be turned into penicillin has resulted in the saving of untold millions of lives. The isolation of the enzyme insulin has reversed what was once a death sentence for anyone with diabetes. There have been great strides in combating conditions for which there is not yet a cure, too. Medicines can help AIDS patients live longer, diagnostic tools such as mammography and ultrasounds can help doctors find tumors while they are treatable, and laser surgery techniques have made the most intricate, minute operations routine.

This toe-to-toe competition with diseases and disorders is even more remarkable when seen in a historical continuum. An astonishing amount of progress has been made in a very short time. Just two hundred years ago, the existence of germs as a cause of some diseases was unknown. In fact, it was less than 150 years ago that a British surgeon named Joseph Lister had difficulty persuading his fellow doctors that washing their hands before delivering a baby might increase the chances of a healthy delivery (especially if they had just attended to a diseased patient)!

Each book in Lucent’s Diseases and Disorders series explores a disease or disorder and the knowledge that has been accumulated (or discarded) by doctors through the years. Each book also examines the tools used for pinpointing a diagnosis, as well as the various means that are used to treat or cure a disease. Finally, new ideas are presented—techniques or medicines that may be on the horizon.

Frustration and disappointment are still part of medicine, for not every disease or condition can be cured or prevented. But the limitations of knowledge are being pushed outward constantly; the most difficult puzzles ever devised are finding challengers every day.

INTRODUCTION

An Unpredictable and Incurable Disease

Multiple sclerosis takes each person it strikes on a frightening journey into uncharted territory. Even though experts know what types of people get multiple sclerosis, also known as MS, no one can predict exactly who will develop this debilitating disease of the central nervous system. For example, MS generally begins between the ages of twenty and fifty, but it can start at a much younger or older age. It strikes women two to three times as often as men, but many men get the disease too. Caucasians seem to get it more than other racial groups, but MS occurs in all racial groups. Most people who get multiple sclerosis live in northern areas of the world or in regions far south of the equator, but no one knows why, and anyone in any geographic location can develop the disorder at any time.

Different Paths for Different People

Once a diagnosis of MS has been made, doctors are unable to predict how the disease will progress. Some patients experience fairly mild symptoms that do not impact their life. Others have unrelenting pain, paralysis, and varying degrees of disability that leave them confined to a bed or a wheelchair, dependent on others for help with simple tasks. In addition, the symptoms of MS may worsen without warning from hour to hour or day to day, making it difficult to schedule activities and make long-term plans.

Multiple sclerosis experts do not yet understand why the disease varies so much in different individuals. According to the authors of Multiple Sclerosis: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed,

We do not know why one person has a progressive course of symptoms and problems, while another has mild disease that produces little disability throughout the lifespan. It can have different patterns in people in the same family and what patterns a person has seems to have nothing to do with anything we can measure in their bodies, their life activities, or whatever steps they take to change things.¹

Patients and their families, as well as doctors, find the unpredictability of MS to be one of the most frustrating things about the disorder. Amy, a young woman who developed MS in her twenties, explains, I think not knowing what will happen is the hardest thing for people when they’re diagnosed with MS. They totally freak out and wonder ‘What’s the disease going to do to me?’ They have to realize that what happens to someone else is not necessarily going to happen to them. And if it does, well, you will have to deal with it.²

An Incurable Disease of the Brain

The journey with this unpredictable disorder is made more frightening by the fact that the brain is the most important organ in the body. Even