What is MS?

Once diagnosed, MS stays with you for life, but treatments and specialists can help you to manage the condition and its symptoms.

More than 150,000 people in the UK have MS. In the UK people are most likely to find out they have MS in their thirties and forties. But the first signs of MS often start years earlier. Many people notice their first symptoms years before they get their diagnosis.

MS affects about two and half times as many women as men. People from many different ethnic backgrounds can get MS. Read the latest statistics on MS in the UK.

What happens when you have MS?

To understand what happens in multiple sclerosis, it's useful to understand how the central nervous system works.

A substance called myelin protects the nerve fibres in the central nervous system. Myelin helps messages travel quickly and smoothly from your brain, down your spinal cord and on to the rest of your body.

Your immune system fights off infections. But in MS it mistakes myelin for something that shouldn't be there, so attacks it. It damaging the myelin, stripping it off the nerve fibres. This leaves scars known as lesions or plaques.

This damage disrupts messages travelling along nerve fibres. They can slow down, become distorted, or not get through at all.

As well as losing the myelin, there can sometimes be damage to the actual nerve fibres too. It's this nerve damage that causes the increase in disability that can occur over time.

What causes MS symptoms?

The central nervous system links everything your body does. So multiple sclerosis can cause many different types of symptoms. The specific symptoms that appear depend on which part of your central nervous system has been affected, and the job the damaged nerve carries out.

Symptoms could be problems with your:

• vision
• balance
• memory and thinking
• emotions
   

But MS is different for everyone. Read about the first symptoms of MS.

What is relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis?

Relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis is a type of MS where you have relapses (symptoms getting worse) followed by recovery (that’s when it’s “remitting”).

In relapsing MS, people have distinct attacks or 'relapses'. New symptoms will suddenly appear, or old ones will come back or get worse. But then these symptoms will either mostly or completely go away again. 

If you don't get diagnosed with this type of MS, you might get a diagnosis instead of two other types of MS: primary progressive MS or secondary progressive MS.

Once you get a diagnosis of MS, it stays with you for life. But treatments and specialists can help you to manage your MS and its symptoms. We're here to help you live well with your MS and fund research to stop MS for good.

How common is multiple sclerosis?

We estimate there are over 150,000 people with MS in the UK, and each year over 7,000 people are newly diagnosed.

This means around 1 in every 400 people in the UK lives with MS, and each week around 135 people are diagnosed with MS.

In the UK people are most likely to find out they have MS in their thirties and forties. But the first signs of MS often start years earlier.

Facts about multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is a neurological condition, meaning it affects your nerves.

‘Sclerosis’ means scarring and refers to the scars (also called lesions or plaques) that MS causes in your brain or spinal cord. These show up in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. It's ‘multiple’ sclerosis because the lesions happen in more than one place.

Everyone's MS is different. No two people, even if they’re closely related, will have the same type of symptoms, or have them as badly.

Relapsing remitting MS (RRMS) is the most common type of MS. Around 85% of people with multiple sclerosis are diagnosed with relapsing remitting MS.

Read more multiple sclerosis facts