Hi everyone - For a while now, I have been seeing on this website, people talking about this. Is there a connection? Does Fibro fall into the category of MS? Any symptoms the same? My daughter, Kim's ex-husband's mother has MS. She has had it for years - started with aches and pains, bumping into things, memory loss. She is so sweet and it pains me to see her now in a wheel chair. She needs 24/7 care. She has had MS for about 11 years now. If you can be give me any info - much appreciated! Love to all! Laurie
I wonder and if you find out would love to know my mom has a rare fast acting ms has been in wheel chair since being diagnosed at 35yrs old and it scares me to death with the issues i have and latly its been worse
Hi Laurie,
No, not that I know of, but I'm not a medical professional. Here is what I have discovered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_great_imitator My best friend has had it at least that long, gives herself a shot, and is doing well, still working. Her biggest problem is fatigue, she has had her eyes move and go out of focus. She was diagnosed by an eye specialist.
I hope that you are well,
SK
Hi Laurie. I'm no expert on MS but it does seem that many people with fibro also have autoimmune diseases. I'm going to pull up a list of MS symptoms so we can see what might be similar to fibro:
- Blurred or double vision
- Thinking problems
- Clumsiness or a lack of coordination
- Loss of balance
- Numbness
- Tingling
- Weakness in an arm or leg.
(This is just a short list of early MS symptoms. For a more in-depth list, go to: http://www.mult-sclerosis.org/mssymptoms.html)
Yes, this short list of MS symptoms does correspond to fibro symptoms, but, of course, there are big differences too. We don't have lesions on our spines. We don't go on to become paralyzed, as do some MS sufferers.
There is a lot of debate as to whether or not fibromyalgia is an auto-immune illness. What is known is that many people with fibro go on to develop an auto-immune illness. So assuming the fibro may in fact be an auto-immune illness, we can ask ourselves, "why do auto-immune diseases occur together?) Well, here are 2 good explanations:
1. Brief, to the point, uses a lot of medical terminology:
Familial or genetic, infectious, immunologic and psychological factors have all been implicated in the development of multiple autoimmune syndrome. Cytomegalovirus, for instance, is shown to cause the development of multiple autoantibodies. And certain autoantibodies are found in disorders affecting multiple organs. Disorders of an autoimmune nature are known to occur with increased frequency in patients with another autoimmune disease. About 25 percent of patients with autoimmune diseases have a tendency to develop additional autoimmune disorders.
2. Longer but easier for the layman to comphrehend, methinks:
The Autoimmune Diseases
By Noel R. Rose,M.D.,Ph.D.,Chairperson, AARDA Scientific Advisory Board;Director of Autoimmune Research Center, The Johns Hopkins University, InFocus, Vol.9, No.2, June 2001
Autoimmune disease defined
The basic definition of an autoimmune disease is a disorder caused by an autoimmune response, i.e., an immune response directed to something in the body of the patient. Since autoimmunity can affect any organ in the body (including brain, skin, kidney, lungs, liver, heart, and thyroid), the clinical expression of the disease depends upon the site affected. In our system of highly compartmentalized medicine, patients with autoimmune disease may be cared for by physicians in virtually any medical specialty.
For many years, the medical establishment was skeptical of the existence of autoimmunity since it seemed to defy common sense. Why would a person develop an immune response to himself rather than to an invading germ? When we realize that the immune response is a powerful and complex biological reaction, however, we can understand that, on occasion, the reaction can misfire. These misfirings of the immune system are the reason that autoimmune diseases occur. Sometimes autoimmunity can be the initiating cause of the disease. In other cases, autoimmunity can contribute to, or exaggerate, a disease caused by something else. The presence of an autoimmune response is signaled by the appearance of autoantibody in the circulation, and so the demonstration of a particular autoantibody usually constitutes the path to recognize an autoimmune disease.
Multiple causes: genetic
What could cause the immune system to misfire in such a harmful manner? Part of the answer is genetic. All of the autoimmune diseases show evidence of a genetic predisposition. No single gene by itself causes an autoimmune disease; instead, a coalescence of several genes in certain individuals, in the aggregate, heightens significantly the overall possibility of developing an autoimmune disease. Some of these genes may be specific for a certain disease, but others predispose to autoimmunity in general. That explains why a single patient may have more than one autoimmune disease or why autoimmune diseases are more common in some families than others.
For the patients, this is an important bit of information because it means that she must alert a physician to the presence of autoimmune disease in the family. We use the pronoun "she" because most autoimmune diseases occur more frequently in women. The reason for this sex-related difference is not known, but it may reflect the involvement of hormones in regulation of the immune response.
Multiple causes: environmental triggers
Another common characteristic of all the autoimmune diseases in humans is that an outside agent is required to initiate the harmful autoimmune process. These agents are called environmental triggers. Even with a genetic predisposition, most people do not develop an autoimmune disease unless something external acts on their body. Sometimes this may be infection; for example, a well known autoimmune disease, rheumatic fever, is associated with a preceding infection by a streptococcus.
Another autoimmune disease, lupus, may be precipitated by exposure to sunlight. Sometimes components of the diet may influence the development of disease; for example, in autoimmune diseases of the thyroid, dietary iodine may be an important initiating factor. It must be emphasized, however, that these environmental triggers act only in individuals with a genetic predisposition and not in the population at large. If the environmental agent can be identified and the patient warned to avoid it, the autoimmune disease may never occur, even in the most highly predisposed individual. One important outcome of the human genome project will be the identification of genes that contribute to an unusual autoimmune susceptibility. Individuals with the greatest risk can than be forewarned.
Overlapping diseases
Thus, it is important, from the clinical point of view, to consider the autoimmune diseases as a united group of disorders. The presence of one autoimmune disease will alert the physician and the patient to the possibility that a second or third autoimmune disease may occur in the same individual or in other members of the same family. The presence of one autoimmune disease may be a sign of heightened susceptibility to a second disease.
Research for new treatments
A great deal of benefit also arises from considering the autoimmune diseases together in the realm of medical research. Virtually all autoimmune diseases are dependent upon the production of an abnormal population of T cells, one of the circulating white blood cells. An effective treatment of autoimmune disease, more efficacious than anything we now have in our armamentarium, would come from finding ways of identifying and turning off these disease-producing T cells. As modern molecular immunology has taught us, the T cell has a unique surface structure. By use of experimental animals, we are learning to identify these disease-associated structures on T cells and to develop methods to eliminate them.
This fundamental level of research cuts across all of the autoimmune diseases. The productive interaction among investigators who study the particular spectrum of the autoimmune diseases, such as the thyroid diseases, multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, the inflammatory bowel diseases, and many more, will teach us the basic lessons necessary to devise more effective, long-term treatments for the broad range of autoimmune diseases.