Not sure if you all are familiar with the classic movie, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" but there is a scene in this comedic adventure where a man pulling a cart through a plague stricken village is yelling "Bring out yer dead."  As the bodies are piled up on his cart one of the Monty Python crew is attempting to place a very live body onto the heap.  In this infamous scene the "dead body that claims that it isn't" declares "But I'm not quite dead yet."  As they banter back and forth the dead collector gives a whack to the poor fellow to hasten the process and loads him onto his cart.

I suppose you had to be there.  What does this have to do with anything?  Bear with me, I'm getting there.

I have this memory of when I was first telling others about my MS diagnosis.  There are just some people you don't want to share such information because they begin talking about the worst case scenarios.  One such individual began telling me right away of people who supposedly died from MS.  "Thanks, that is just so uplifting." I muttered.  Of course this was the same person who, when I talked about being pregnant years ago, told me stories about how women still die in childbirth.  The gloom and doom person is sort of like shock therapy.  Once you ingest these frightful stories then you can move along to adopting a more realistic perspective. 

To such a doomsdayer, I proclaim with my best British accent, "But I'm not quite dead yet!"

One of the first questions a patient who has just been diagnosed with MS wants to know after they ask whether or not they will be in a wheelchair is, "Am I gonna die from MS?"

Did I ask my neurologist this question?  You bet I did.  Hey, I want to know these things right up front.  And the answer I was given was a very definite "NO" and only in the rarest of cases does someone die directly from having Multiple Sclerosis.  This is not considered a fatal disease.

"Whew!" 

"Okay but what about Richard Pryor and other people you hear about in the news all the time that died from complications of their MS.  What is that all about?"

What is our life expectancy when we have MS?  And what are these complications of MS which people don't talk a whole lot about? 

And so I did a little research to find some answers.

Depending upon which source you look at the answers vary about our life expectancy.  For example, in a Danish study entitled, "Survival of Multiple Sclerosis Patients in Denmark" published in Neurology 1994 Oct;44(10): 1901-7, the authors state their findings that:  "The median survival time from onset of the disease was 28 years in men (compared with 40 years in the matched general male population) and 33 years in women (versus 46 years)."

Yet that study is over ten years old so what do more recent resources say?  The National MS Society says that most people with multiple sclerosis can expect 95 percent of the normal life expectancy.  How does this translate into years?  On average people die slightly less than forty years after their first symptoms.