How Multiple Sclerosis Affects The Body - Yale Medicine Explains

Transcript

• 00:01- The nervous system is the information network that's necessary
• 00:04to make all of the body work together.
• 00:14Muscles don't contract until they get the message to contract,
• 00:16which comes from the brain going through the spine,
• 00:19out through the peripheral nerves and then to the muscles.
• 00:22We have the central nervous system,
• 00:24which is the brain, the spinal cord and the optic nerves.
• 00:28And then you have what we call the peripheral nervous system,
• 00:31and that's attached to the central nervous system,
• 00:34its smaller nerves as they leave the spine
• 00:36and go out to the edges of the bodies at the fingertips
• 00:38and the toes and basically everywhere.
• 00:42Multiple sclerosis happens to attack just the central nervous system.
• 00:45So the brain, the spinal cord or the optic nerves.
• 00:48But obviously, that can
• 00:51impact pretty much any part of your body.
• 00:59Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease
• 01:04where the immune system,
• 01:06which is supposed to be your body's armed forces,
• 01:09protecting you from infections and things on the outside.
• 01:13But in the case of MS, it gets its orders confused
• 01:15and instead of attacking germs and things like that,
• 01:18it attacks the brain, the spine and the optic nerves.
• 01:22So because the central nervous system have connections to the entire body,
• 01:28the symptoms that are caused by multiple sclerosis are very different
• 01:33depending on what part of the central nervous system
• 01:35is being attacked by the immune system at any given time.
• 01:40Initially, for most people, it presents as a sudden, relatively sudden onset of neurologic symptoms.
• 01:46That could be loss of vision, it could be trouble walking, it could be numbness
• 01:49and that's very much a change from what normal should be.
• 01:55When we look at the person's MRI, we find inflammation.
• 01:59That's the immune system causing damage.
• 02:02If left to itself, MS tends to just become what we call progressive,
• 02:06which just means people slowly get worse over many years
• 02:08and that is something we want to avoid.
• 02:17In the early 1990s, there were no treatments for multiple sclerosis.
• 02:22Zilch, nada, not a thing.
• 02:25Now we have over 20 different immunotherapies that can control the disease
• 02:30and while they're not cures, they can effectively put the disease into remission for many, many years
• 02:36and so the first changes in MS are most likely immunologic changes
• 02:42and Yale, as a immunologic powerhouse,
• 02:45is uniquely suited to do this kind of deep inquiry
• 02:49into these patients immune systems
• 02:51and tease out what's gone wrong.
• 02:56The frontier for multiple sclerosis is on both ends.
• 02:58First, find it earlier, treat it earlier.
• 03:01Maybe we can prevent it.
• 03:02But also for the patients who have lived with the disease for many years,
• 03:06how can we improve their lives, improve their level of function?
• 03:10And so I think both on both ends of the spectrum, there's room for improvement.