Quote:
Originally Posted by Snoopy
Your Neurologist did a Neurological exam/evaluation. Since he said nothing was wrong your Neurological exam/evaluation was normal. When someone has Multiple Sclerosis the Neurological exam/evaluation is never completely normal, there will always be some deficits/abnormal results.
Drs. look for "signs" that might indicate what is going on with a patient. Signs are those thing found on exam and testing. At this point and from what you have written, there is no sign for your symptoms. This does not mean you are making it up, it could simply mean whatever is going on isn't detectable at this point.
There are many conditions, medication side effects, vitamin/mineral deficiencies and mental health problems that can cause similar symptoms as those seen in MS. Part of the diagnostic criteria requires all other possible causes for a person's symptoms be ruled out.
Multiple Sclerosis is a demyelinating Disease of the Central Nervous System. The diagnostic criteria (The Revised McDonald Criteria) relies heavily on MRI evidence.
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Hi CrystalAnn,
Sorry for the late reply, but hopefully you have been able to make some progress on getting your MRI results from the previous scan. I am going to disagree slightly with Snoopy in that I have had MS for over 10 years now, and the physical exam by the neurologist is never anything other than completely normal for me. All of my symptoms have been cognitive or neurosensory (hearing loss, visual fluctuations, etc), not physical deficits that the neurologist would measure with their exam.
What I will say is first, go look at the McDonald Criteria Snoopy referenced. When I had my first symptoms and MRI, the Neurologist said almost the exact same thing to me..."you have these odd spots in your brain that show up on the MRI, but you don't have enough of them or enough in the right spots for me to call it MS". I thought that meant she didn't think the spots were MS...what she really meant was that the spots alone with one round of clinical symptoms were not enough to get me a Dx based on the McDonald Criteria. Two years later, after a subsequent MRI showed 7 spots instead of 2, I got a Dx of MS despite not having any new symptoms, because I now satisfied the McDonald Criteria by having 3 or more lesions and new lesions separated by more than 6 months from the original 2 that were noted.
Second, get a copy of the MRI disk and report from the first time you had one, and take it to any subsequent neurologists you go to. They will need to compare any subsequent MRI results to that initial scan in order to see if there were changes. I would strongly suggest that if you are still having the symptoms, that you go back to a neurologist with a list of symptoms, a timeline of when your episodes have come on and then gone away, and that older MRI, and ask for a new MRI to compare it to. Also, if you are actively having symptoms, make sure they do the MRI with and without contrast to see if there are any lesions enhanced by contrast, which would mean the lesion was a location of "active" demyelination. The terms you would be looking for in the report from the old MRI would be something like "hyperintense foci" or "lesion" or some other description of spots.
Lastly, given that many of your symptoms seem to be presenting in your arms, there is a possibility that the lesions could be in your spinal cord and not in your brain if it is MS-related. So if the first MRI was only of the brain, it might have missed anything going on in your spine. The spinal XRay saying nothing "bony" is wrong is actually a good start, because it can rule out compression of the spinal cord by disk or vertebrae alignment issues. But an MRI would be needed to actually see lesions on the spinal cord of the type that would be caused by MS.
The best thing you can do is go google the diagnostic criteria and learn about how MS presents in MRIs, so that when you talk to the neurologist, you can ask educated questions about what they are or are not seeing and what they are trying to tell you. Good luck, and let us know how we can help!
Bill