It's important to work with your doctor and go through all of the differential diagnoses before accepting an MS diagnosis as final--especially before beginning a disease modifying treatment. For a list of other diseases and medical situations which can be mistaken for MS, please see this publication:
It is apparent that diagnosing MS is not an exact science, but more akin to a process of elimination.
In the three years since I began writing about MS research, I've heard from readers originally diagnosed with MS, who were later told it was actually Celiac disease, low vitamin B12 levels, migraine, Lyme disease, ischemic disease, Hughes Syndrome, TIAs, co-infection with Cpn and other illnesses.
Please note, I do not question my husband's MS diagnosis. I question the characterization of his disease process as autoimmune. According to the McDonald criteria, he has MS. He has lesions disseminated in time and space, and had banding in his CSF.
But what is MS? Isn't is simply a diagnosis made by looking at symptoms, not aetiology?
Was Jeff's disease diagnosis related to his venous malformations and slowed collateral blood flow?
Here’s more on “undiagnosing MS” from a paper published in Neurology journal last year, authored by three neurologists. I purchased the paper to learn more, so I could share this information with you. It is entitled,
“Undiagnosing” multiple sclerosis: The challenge of misdiagnosis in MS
Three academic neurologists sent out a questionnaire to other academic neurologists in the US---they utilized names and e-mails from the Consortium of MS Centers registry and via google.
242 individual neurologists and 122 survey were completed--which resulted in a response rate of 50.4%
These neurologists were asked:
“Have you ever evaluated a patient who carried a diagnosis of MS (given by another provider) for longer than a year who, after your neurologic exam and review of lab data, you strongly felt did NOT in fact have MS?”
Nearly all respondents (95.1%) had evaluated such a patient in the past.
Over one-third (34.4%) reported seeing 6 or more misdiagnosed patients in the last year, including 20 (17.2%) respondents who had seen 10 or more such patients.
