by Vernon Rowe, Doug Schell, and Aaron Seacat
March is MS Awareness Month. This time of year we as a country focus on MS, a disease that affects more than 400,000 people in the US and is a major crippler of young adults. The good news about MS is we have thirteen FDA approved drugs for the treatment of this disease, and many more are in the pipelines of pharmaceutical companies. The bad news is that MS has no known cause, no known cure, and these approved drugs cost patients and their insurers $52,000 to $70,000 every year. See Approved MS Treatments
We at the Rowe Neurology Institute Comprehensive MS Treatment Center have been involved in Research and Treatment of MS for over 20 years, in every phase from basic, bench research, to clinical treatment trials.
Over the years, we’ve come to realize how important it is that patients with MS be seen rapidly when they have a relapse, and to educate them what a relapse is. We see patients quickly when a relapse occurs, because just as in stroke, “time is brain” when it comes to the inflammation changes that occur in the brain, optic nerves, and spinal cord during a relapse.
And we live by the principle rules of MS care:
1. We are picky about the diagnosis. (Every year we see many patients treated with MS drugs who don’t actually have MS.) The diagnosis is not a guestimate. There are definite criteria.
2. We see our patients with MS on a regular basis. (We don’t just pat our patients on the head and tell them to come back only if they have problems. MS is a disease that needs to be followed carefully to make sure that therapy is working.)
3. We don’t blame every symptom on MS. We listen to our patients carefully. Because of this, we were the first to show nearly 15 years ago that patients with MS have a much higher prevalence of sleep disorders than the general population. These can be pro-inflammatory, and produce fatigue and cognitive symptoms independent of MS.
So it’s nice that we have an MS awareness month, to honor those patients living with MS and their caregivers. But for us at the RNI, every month, every day is an MS awareness day, just as it is for our patients.
