What is Multiple Sclerosis?
Learning about MS
When I was first diagnosed with MS my knowledge of the disease was limited to the effect it had on my aunt. This motivated me to try to understand the disease. I read all that I could on the internet and in the library. Much of what I read concluded that MS was an autoimmune disease and I decided this conclusion was correct.
MS damages your nervous system
An autoimmune disease occurs when your immune system attacks part of your body. MS attacks the mylein sheath that covers your nerve fibers. The myelin sheath acts like the insulation on a wire in a computer. Damage to the insulation can interfere with electrical signals sent through the wire. Similarly, damage to the myelin sheath can interfere with nerve signals sent from your brain to control parts of your body. When damage occurs to your myelin sheath your body tries to heal the damage by forming scar tissue on the nerve sheath. Scarring of the myelin sheath is similar to scarring of your skin. If you receive a small scratch your skin will heal fairly quickly and completely. If you receive a large gash the healing takes much longer and may never be complete. The healed skin may no longer function as well as it did before injury. Myelin sheath scarring has the same issues. Severe scarring may result in permanent damage.
​
Healing
My right leg muscle control and balance have improved greatly since my MS progression halted, but my right foot is still slightly numb 13 years after my MS progression stopped, especially when I am tired. Different people heal at different rates and to different completeness so long term effects and recovery from MS damage are hard to predict and likely to vary from person to person.
​
Self Recognition
Several things must go wrong for your immune system to attack your body. The immune system has a feature called self recognition. When it is functioning properly it recognizes features in parts of your body that prevent it from attacking. This self recognition feature must fail for an autoimmune disease to occur.
​
Sequence Matching
The immune system also has ways of identifying foreign objects (antigens). The primary antigens of concern are proteins. Proteins consist of chains that are made up of links called amino acids. There are 20 primary amino acids. The sequence that these amino acids (links of the chain) are in form a pattern. For each link there is a possibility of attaching to 20 different links. This means that the number of patterns (combinations) for 2 links is 20 and the number of combinations for 3 links is 400. As the chain length increases the number of possible combinations continues to increase. The number of combinations for a chain length of 100 links is astronomically large. The immune system uses these differences in sequence to identify specific proteins. For an autoimmune reaction to occur the immune system must incorrectly identify part of the body as a foreign object that it has previously identified. This requires very high similarity (high percentage matching of amino acid sequences in the protein chain) between the antigen (milk proteins) and the myelin sheath proteins.
​
Antigens
Most autoimmune reactions require a trigger from the environment external to the body. For this to occur the antigen (protein trigger) must enter a fluid path of the body (such as a blood vessel). MS patients have a higher level of dietary antigens (gluten, gliadin and casein) than the general population. In other words milk proteins such as casein (possible antigens) are known to be present at higher concentrations in MS patients than the general population