Why everyday stress can make MS symptoms worse

[Prot]

When actor Christina Applegate recently told her followers on Instagram that her legs were “busted” because stress makes her multiple sclerosis (MS) worse, many people with the condition immediately recognised the feeling.

Her comment summed up something researchers have been studying for decades and people with Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register... have been describing for even longer: stress, even from everyday situations, can trigger symptoms or make existing ones flare.

Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register...

[agate]

Interesting article--thank you for finding and posting this!

If you have MS long enough or if you happen to start out with a progressive form of it, you might no longer have relapses as such. Instead you have constant symptoms that come and go on a daily basis. How much or how often these symptoms turn up seems to depend on your general health, whether you've had enough sleep, the temperature of your environment, and how much stress you're putting up with.

If I don't have too much to do, I can pay attention to the way I do ordinary things like pick something up or find the words for something I want to say--or even put one foot in front of the other without tripping. All of the ordinary things a person does take more concentration with MS because they're trickier. You can't really depend on any part of your body to function as it's meant to do.

With stress added in, you're probably having to concentrate more on getting something done, maybe in a hurry, and so you fail to give as much attention to those ordinary activities. When I'm under stress, I'm more apt to fall, drop things, make huge mistakes, be forgetful, have slurred speech, and so on.

The trick is to make absolutely sure I'm not ever under too much stress and that is a tall order.