While many people have heard of multiple sclerosis, when they or a loved one are diagnosed with it the first question they normally ask is "What is MS?" This is a very valid question and has many different answers.
In essence MS or multiple sclerosis is a disease of the central nervous system that affects many thousands of people around the world.
It can be difficult to live with at the least and devastating to many, in most cases it is a progressive disease for which there is no known cure.
The hardest part of answering the question "What is MS?",is not so much trying to define what it is as how it affects different people and how to recognize the signs and symptoms that can lead to a diagnose it.
The problem with multiple sclerosis is that the symptoms vary so dramatically from person to person that a proper diagnosis is not made until the disease is well established.
In order to understand more about multiple sclerosis we need to look at what happens to your body when you have the disease.
When talking about what MS is you need to start out by understanding a little bit about the central nervous system.
This system consists of your brain, your optic nerves and your spinal cord.
These three parts of the body are responsible in one way or another for how your entire body functions.
When there is damage done to any one of them it will most likely have consequences such as the symptoms noted with multiple sclerosis.
There is more to understand the question 'What is MS?" than understanding the systems that it is involved in.
It is thought by most members of the medical community that multiple sclerosis is an auto immune disease.
The real terminology being used today is that it is an "immune mediated" disease.
Essentially this means that one or more malfunctions in the body's immune system cause varying levels of damage to the central nervous system.
In a person who does not have multiple sclerosis the immune system is capable of recognizing its own cells and not treating them as some form of pathogen.
When the immune system fails to recognize the body's cell as a part of the greater "self" the immune system goes on the defensive.
It begins to attack healthy cells causing the damage and lesions that are the root cause of the symptoms experienced with MS.
These are the basic findings that the medical community has come to understand and can help to answer the question "What is MS?" in a technical manner.
To the average person who has multiple sclerosis or knows someone who has been diagnosed with it, the disease is one that cannot be cured at this time.
There are many therapies, dietary and lifestyle changes that one can make that can help to keep the disease in remission for long periods of time.