Minor or Serious?

[weeone7]

what does it mean when a persons MS has traveled into their spine?And what can they excpect?

[HVAC]

I have had spinal lesions for decades. I still walk unassisted. You would hardly know I have MS. I ride horses. At 50 I live a pretty normal life. Each case of MS is different. I thought spinal lesions meant I was wheelchair bound. So far I have a slow progressing MS and may never see a wheelchair in my future.

Alex

[kwarendorf]

Hi weeone -

As others here have mentioned, spinal lesions don't always mean the same thing. We all have our own version of MS, yourself included. The only generality that comes to mind is that the impact of a lesion travels down, not up. If you have a lesion in your c-spine, symptoms generated by that lesion can appear from the lesion downward, toward your feet. It's unlikely that the c-spine lesion would effect your hearing for example.

I have lesions in both my my cervical and thoracic spine, as well as in my brain. If you were to see me you would never think I had MS :-)

Welcome to our group!
Kyle

[sllowe]

HI Weeone,

It's significant in the sense if you "only" had them in your brain initially. It may mean, you need to switch therapy (i.e, increase in lesion load, more attacks, etc) and it's important you discuss this with your doc.

Can you tell us a little more? How long have you had MS? Have you been on a disease modifier?

Fwiw - My doc said my spinal lesion was causing most all of my problems. There may or may not be a correlation between lesions and symptoms at times, but in my case, it was most definitely the case. Oftentimes, it's specific symptoms that lead a neuro to image specific areas simply because of what and where they are having problems.

Hope we can help - I would say a new plan is in order if this is a new area of demyelination for you :)
Thanks for joining us.
-shell

[Lulu54]

Hi and welcome to the forum.  I saw your quesiton and then read the EXCELLENT reply you got.  There's not much more I can add to Immesceo's  write up.  I hope you will stick around and share more of your story with us as you feel comofrotable to do so.
-Laura

[immisceo]

MS doesn't really 'travel' in that sense. Lesions (areas of present inflammation) and scleroses (areas with evidence of past inflammation) can appear anywhere in the central nervous system (the brain, the spinal cord, the optic nerves) with no real predictable pattern (aside from some areas of the brain being more 'typical' for MS lesions than other areas of the brain).

However, spinal cord lesions *can* be a bit trickier. If a lesion appears in the brain, it may very well produce no symptoms at all. Because the spinal cord is such a smaller/narrower area than the brain with less tissue around it, a spinal lesion may be a bit more likely to produce noticeable symptoms.

But as with everything with MS, its course will be highly, highly individual. Someone may have a lot of symptomatic difficulty with zero spinal lesions while someone may have spinal lesions with minimal symptomatic complications. It's truly impossible to predict.

If someone has spinal lesions, it's neither 'minor' nor 'serious' when stated with no other context. It is just their personal manifestation of MS as found by exam or MRI. You'll find folks here with spinal lesions and without them (that they know of. They can be tricky little devils to image properly!), and every flavour of symptoms (including none) among them.

I notice this is your first post. There's a lot of information here and it can be a bit overwhelming to start with. But I'd like to point you to our health pages. There's a wealth of great info over there. http://www.medhelp.org/health_pages/list?cid=36

This one may be especially helpful as it deal with spinal lesions directly. http://www.medhelp.org/health_pages/Multiple-Sclerosis/Spinal-Cord-Lesions/show/764?cid=36