Quote:
Originally Posted by Bearygood
Thanks for your replies, everyone. I guess there's not a real answer but maybe I'll give it a shot with my doctor. Just curious as to what they expect to see over time on the MRIs.
Seeing these replies though really did reinforce the "treat the patient not the MRI" phrase. Ironic that progression is measured in the RRMS phase as what the MRI says since it seems pretty clear that the transition to SPMS can happen without any kind of real warning on the films. Not that it definitely does happen that way or that everyone will definitely progress, just that it can happen that way.
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my MRIs have not changed one iota in the six years since I was diagnosed. I have one tiny lesion in my brain, and a much larger lesion on my cervical spine. They have never enhanced, they have never been joined by any other lesions, and they have never gone away. My MRIs today look exactly as they did six years ago.
In the meantime, I've gone from having a slight limp in my right leg to having my entire right side rendered almost entirely useless by weakness and spasticity, which is now spreading to my left side. Six years ago I was able to walk for miles, even with the limp. Today I use a power wheelchair.
The moral of the story is that MRI images only tell a very small part of the total clinical picture of a patient. There is very little direct relation between lesion load and physical disability, what's more important is the location of the lesions. Don't get too hung up on whether you have more lesions than you had last time. Ultimately, it's your physical state that is the ultimate arbiter of how you are doing...