Pain
Pain is a common symptom in MS; appearing in 55% of patients at some point of their disease process, especially as time passes. It is strong and debilitating and has a profound effect in the quality of life and mental health of the sufferer. It usually appears after a lesion to the ascending or descending tracts that control the transmission of painful stimulus, such as the anterolateral system, but many other causes are also possible. Most frequent pains reported are headaches (40%), dysesthetic limb pain (19%), back pain (17%), and painful spasms (11%).
Acute pain is mainly due to optic neuritis, trigeminal neuralgia, Lhermitte's sign or dysesthesias. Subacute pain is usually secondary to the disease and can be a consequence of spending too much time in the same position, urinary retention, or infected skin ulcers. Chronic pain is common and harder to treat.
Read more about this topic: Multiple Sclerosis Signs And Symptoms
Famous quotes containing the word pain:
“If ever you prove false to one another, since I have taken such pain to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name; call them all Pandars.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Women hock their jewels and their husbands’ insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)