2023-12-27 18:00:00
Amandine, a patient diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) at the age of 16, following 7 years of therapeutic wandering, readily confides: “How many times have doctors told me: but it’s in your head ! They even told me I was crazy. » And this when Amandine described tingling in the hands, chronic fatigue, dizziness, nausea, depressive phases or even digestive and walking problems.
However, these symptoms are often characteristic of MS. This neurological disease currently affects 120,000 French people, two-thirds of whom are women, with an average age at diagnosis of 32 years for all sexes combined.
Depression, sexual disorders, constipation, cystitis…
According to French researchers, it would be possible to make the link between certain symptoms and the onset of MS, even before the disease manifests itself.
To prove it, the team of Professors Octave Guinebretiere and Thomas Nedelac* reviewed some 113 symptoms over a period of 5 years, among “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, in this case 30,477 patients suffering from Crohn’s disease and 7,337 from lupus.
As a result, patients developing “MS have more depression, sexual problems, constipation, cystitis and other urinary tract infections” in the 5 years preceding their diagnosis. “These symptoms persisted and increased during the five years following diagnosis. »
Delay the onset of disability as much as possible
The fact remains that these symptoms, also associated with Crohn’s disease or lupus, “will not be enough to make an early diagnosis, but they will certainly help us to better understand the mechanisms of multiple sclerosis – the causes of which are multiple – and to reconstruct its natural history,” notes Professor Guinebretiere.
“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 appearance of the disability as much as possible,” hopes Professor Céline Louapre, neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital and head of the clinical investigation center of the Brain Institute.
Symptoms not to be taken lightly
“One of the great difficulties of multiple sclerosis is [en effet] 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 significantly limits our ability to predict the course of the disease.”
Fortunately, most patients with these symptoms will never develop MS or other autoimmune diseases. But “in certain familial forms of multiple sclerosis, for example, these signs will help to alert as early as possible, and perhaps to intervene at the therapeutic level”.
*Sorbonne University, Paris Brain Institute – ICM, Inserm, CNRS, Inria, Paris, France
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