Education about Pediatric MS is on the rise, and more children under 18 are being diagnosed with MS. With all of the new information and education, there is still a need for awareness that children have MS, too. Children are often misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all.

For so long, MS was misunderstood. In the 1950's, when I was a child, it was thought MS was the crippler of mostly young adult women. With time and research, the medical community began to understand more. MS did not always mean paralysis, nor did it follow a predictable path. In fact, MS did not discriminate. It affected both men and women, and it affected all ages. Older people were being diagnosed and even babies!

MS affects 4.5 million people worldwide, and 2-5% of them are children. Since the population for MS was always considered an adult disease, children who presented MS-like symptoms were often misdiagnosed. It was difficult to diagnose adults and even more difficult to diagnose children, especially since pediatricians often did not consider MS to be an option. It is a shame children went through adolescence and teen years with MS-like symptoms without ever knowing why.

Pediatricians who saw MS-like symptoms in young kids thought it must be something else. This was true beginning with Dr. Jean Martin Charcot's patients in the 19th Century. In the late 20th Century, however, many young adults were encouraged to search their medical history. Some remembered symptoms they had when younger. This indicated the patients could have had MS long before their diagnosis, maybe even as young as 10.

With that information in hand, teens who presented MS-like symptoms were tested and diagnosed. These teen patients began to remember similar symptoms even earlier than ten.  Before 1990, the age of MSer diagnosis was generally considered to be between10 and 50. There were undoubtedly older and younger patients identified, but that was the exception. Although children have been complaining of MS-like symptoms, they were generally not considered to be candidates.

In 1999, the University of Catania in Italy published a paper about a study of MS in children under 6. The study included patient information from their institution. While all of these patients exhibited classic symptoms, less than half were supported by the laboratory. The study group was small, but approximately 10% began showing these symptoms before they were two, more than half of those before age one. The study concluded that children under six could be consistently diagnosed using the Poser criteria (which preceded the McDonald criteria I most often use as a reference), and they suggested a lower age be accepted for MS diagnosis.

Symptoms
MS was not generally considered a children's disease until recently, and so many conditions mimic MS. Few children are articulate to the point of describing severity of pain.  This can often pinpoints the difference between one condition and another. Just by being kids they hindered their own diagnosis.