When Michael Williamson was 16 years old, he noticed a few odd cramps one day at a cross-country track meet. His coach told him to run them out. A day or so later, he woke up completely paralyzed from the waist down.
After a lot of testing and poking and prodding, Williamson was told he had something called transverse myelitis. "I saw a lot of specialists, but no one mentioned MS," says Williamson, now 27 and the owner of an adventure travel company in Colorado.
He recovered and continued his active, athletic lifestyle. It wasn’t until another episode of paralysis -- this one in college -- that Williamson was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Since then, he’s religiously taken the disease-modifying drugs designed to hold MS at bay, and hasn’t had another attack in nearly 10 years.
Benefits of MS Treatment
If Williamson were to have that first attack today, he would likely start medication right away. That’s because doctors have changed how multiple sclerosis is diagnosed, based on strong evidence for the benefits of disease-modifying therapies.
Disease-modifying therapies for people with multiple sclerosis have been shown to have two main benefits, according to Mark Keegan, MD, associate professor of neurology and section chair in multiple sclerosis and autoimmune neurology at the Mayo Clinic:
- A reduction in the total amount of clinical "attacks" associated with the disease, such as periods of paralysis, loss of vision, or other debilitating symptoms
- Less disability over the short term. That means that within six months to two years after diagnosis, people who started therapy were less disabled than those who began treatment later.
But exactly how much do these therapies really change the course of your disease? If you start on MS medications now, will that mean you’ll be less likely to be in a wheelchair 10 years from now than if you waited until later to start taking them?
"That’s still uncertain," Keegan says. "There are some ongoing studies that might tell us more, but it’s a hard question to answer."
One study of the drug Avonex to treat MS found that early treatment resulted in lower rates of relapse. But there wasn't much difference in the rate of long-term disability associated with early and late treatment. The good news: no matter when treatment was initiated, people on medications for MS had relatively low rates of disability. And both groups showed no significant worsening of the disease between 5 and 10 years from diagnosis.
Some experts do think that patients who delay treatment never really catch up. "It’s well known that worsening MS, with an increase in sustained accumulation of disability, is an irreversible process," says Edward Fox, MD, PhD, clinical associate professor of neurology at the University of Texas Medical Branch and director of the MS Clinic of Central Texas. "Because of that, if you have worsening in the early stages of your disease, you’re unlikely to be able to reverse that damage by getting on preventive medications later on."
Source: WebMD