Pennie Leibensperger, age 12, of Allentown, Pa., for her question:

WHAT IS MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS?

Multiple sclerosis is a disease that often begins when a person enters young adulthood. It can also first appear as a person goes into his early middle years. Once it begins, it will usually last a lifetime, but there are many cases where there are periods of remission, when the symptoms of the disease disappear completely. Often there is a later relapse with a return of the symptoms.

People with multiple sclerosis, which is also called MS, develop gray patches in the white matter of their brains and spinal cords for reasons that are unknown to medical men. The result is an impairment of parts of the body controlled by the affected white matter.

With MS patients, often the spine is involved with numbness, tingling and paralysis being found not only in the back but also in the leg muscles controlled by nerves that run up the spinal cord.

If the white matter that is damaged is in that part of the brain which controls the eyes, the MS victim's vision may be blurred and in some cases he may even become blind. At times there can be difficulty in controlling the bladder or improper functioning of other parts of the body.

Many multiple sclerosis patients, especially as they grow older, may become incapacitated as far as leg muscles are concerned and they must spend much of their time in wheelchairs. Others continue to be able to move about with varying degrees of difficulty.

Multiple sclerosis has been found to occur, in some cases, after a patient has had an infection, an accident, a vaccination, been pregnant or has been exposed to some physical stress. But there have been no definite relationships established between these various circumstances and the onset of multiple sclerosis.

Doctors have found more cases of multiple sclerosis in damp, cold climates than in warm, dry places. They point out, however, that this fact gives few clues as to the cause. In fact, MS patients usually feel worse when the temperatures go up and better when they go down.

MS patients usually feel more comfortable when they receive physical therapy that promotes circulation. Treatments in whirpool baths and massage bring good results.

Multiple sclerosis patients usually live as long as healthy individuals, but under some degree of handicap.*  

Doctors have noted, strangely, that many persons with long-standing multiple sclerosis usually express strong feelings of well-being with very few signs of discouragement. It has led medical people to believe that perhaps the patients' signs of optimism are due to some brain damage which somehow blocks out pessimistic outlooks.