People newly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) may often have other chronic health conditions as well, according to a large Canadian study published in the April 5 issue of Neurology.
For the study, researchers assessed how common several chronic conditions were in 23,382 people with MS at the time of their diagnosis and compared the results with 116,638 people of the same age and sex who did not have MS. The conditions included high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, chronic lung disease, epilepsy, fibromyalgia, inflammatory bowel disease, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
The researchers found the people with MS at the time of their diagnosis had higher rates of every one of the chronic conditions, with the exception of high cholesterol.
The rates were especially high for mental illness. At least 19 percent of those with MS had depression compared to 9 percent of those without.
MS can take time to diagnose and patients often experience symptoms long before they receive a diagnosis, says Dr. John Webb of St. Elizabeth Physicians Neurology. Consequently, “It is not surprising that there exists higher rates of psychiatric symptoms at the time of diagnosis as patients may become depressed knowing that there is something wrong with them that has not yet been diagnosed.”
For many of the conditions, the rates differed for men and women with MS. For example, men with MS were 48 percent more likely to have high blood pressure than were other men of similar age; whereas, women with MS were only 16 percent more likely to have high blood pressure than women without the disease. Men with MS also had disproportionately higher levels of diabetes, epilepsy, depression and anxiety than women with MS. Women with MS had disproportionately higher levels of chronic lung disease than men with MS.
The study “begs the question of whether there are shared risk factors for MS and these comorbid diseases,” write William Grant, , of the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center in San Francisco, Calif., and Trond Riise of the University of Bergen, Norway in a corresponding editorial. “If so, recognizing them could lead to recommendations that would reduce the risk of both MS and the comorbid diseases.”
Finding the answers depends on more research, says Dr. Webb. “It will be interesting to see the cause and effect relationship between multiple sclerosis and these other illnesses as more research is focused in this area.”
