It is a disease that affects millions of people. According to figures, 130,000 people live with multiple sclerosis. One million are affected in Europe and nearly three million worldwide. A chronic neurodegenerative disease, it cannot currently be cured since no treatment exists. And its diagnosis is often long. The fault lies in changing symptoms depending on the patient but also in large parts of the body affected.
“One of the great difficulties of multiple sclerosis is that we do not observe a strict correspondence between the severity of the lesions present on the nerve fibers and the symptoms of the patients. This considerably limits our ability to predict disease progression, explained Professor Céline Louapre, neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital.
The challenge today is to detect the disease as early as possible, well before the lesions are visible by MRI, in the hope of delaying the onset of the disability as long as possible.”
These five signs that could be linked
And to get there, scientists are carrying out studies. With researchers at the Brain Institute, Céline Louapre compared numerous results to discover five warning signs. In total, they analyzed 20,174 patients with multiple sclerosis, 54,790 patients without multiple sclerosis and 37,814 patients affected by two autoimmune diseases which, like MS, mainly affect women and young adults (Crohn’s disease and lupus). ).
With these analyses, they pointed out Five signs that could be linked to multiple sclerosis
: depression, sexual disorders, constipation, cystitis and other urinary tract infections. “This association was statistically robust enough for us to say that these are early clinical signs, probably related to nervous system damage, in patients who will later be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.”reacted the specialist.
5,000 new cases in France each year
“On their own, these signs will not be enough to make an early diagnosis; but they will certainly help us to better understand the mechanisms of multiple sclerosis – of which there are multiple causes – and to reconstruct its natural historyadded the researcher. Finally, these new data reinforce our idea that The disease begins well before the appearance of classic neurological symptoms.“
In 70% of cases, multiple sclerosis is diagnosed between the ages of 25 and 35. Each year in France, 5,000 new diagnoses are made by specialists. And among those affected, 3 out of 4 are women. According to Inserm, MS is the leading cause of severe non-traumatic disability in young adults.
