Your Health

What Does MS Mean To You?

Posted 3/11/2011

Phil Keoghan continues to propel the MS Movement forward. Download his documentary “The Ride,” about his bike ride across America that raised awareness and funds to end MS, on www.noopportunitywasted.com.

(NAPSI) - Phil Keoghan, host of “The Amazing Race” reality show, knows there is nothing more amazing than watching someone respond to a challenge with grace and power. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a life-altering disease that affects each person in a unique and different way. So if you’re like Phil and know someone living with MS, you too know someone truly amazing.

Multiple sclerosis is an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system that interrupts the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and body. Symptoms range from reduced or lost mobility to numbness and tingling to blindness and paralysis. The progress, severity and specific symptoms of MS in any one person cannot yet be predicted. Most people with MS are diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50, with at least two to three times more women than men having the disease. In the U.S. alone, someone is newly diagnosed each hour.

Advances in research are moving closer to stopping the disease, restoring function and ending MS forever, and we’ve seen MS move from an untreatable disease in 1993 to a treatable one today for the vast majority of people now diagnosed, thanks to the growing public support spurring exciting research breakthroughs. In fact, the first oral therapies that treat MS and manage MS symptoms are now available. Moreover, there are at least a dozen therapies moving through the pipeline that hold promise of new and improved treatments for the disease.

Find out how you can join Phil Keoghan and be a part of the amazing race to end multiple sclerosis during MS Awareness Week and beyond. Find out what MS means to the hundreds of thousands of people living with its daily challenges. Visit www.nationalMSsociety.org.

• Whether you volunteer, bike, walk, advocate, educate, support—every action is a way of moving us closer to a world without multiple sclerosis.

• From the Society’s national site you will find ways to build the MS Movement. You can even find out how you can share your own video story, download Web banners, sign up to participate in or volunteer for Walk MS or Bike MS or some other special chapter event.

To continue to move us closer to a world free of MS, we must leave no opportunity wasted in this MS research revolution.