Early Diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis: Difficult But Important

| Total Words: 960

The principal dilemma in current management of multiple sclerosis is that while early diagnosis enables damage-sparing treatment to begin, diagnosing MS too early increases the likelihood of treating people who don’t actually have the disease. Current disease-modifying drugs are all given by injection and cost about $14,000 per year. Apart from being inconvenient and expensive, there is some risk of harm from them which, if the patient doesn’t actually have MS, occurs without any offsetting benefit.

The dilemma would not be great if multiple sclerosis was easy to diagnose, but unfortunately MS is among the most difficult diagnoses in all of medicine to make, at least while still in its early stages. Early in the course of symptoms, MS can resemble other conditions; moreover, other conditions can resemble MS.

Affecting 2.5 million people worldwide and 350,000 people in the U.S. alone, multiple sclerosis is not exactly a rare disease. It affects women at least twice as often as men and begins early in adulthood with most cases starting between the ages of 20 and 40.

MS is a so-called autoimmune disease, meaning that a person’s immune...

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