Primary Progressive MS: Does Gender Matter?

Most forms of multiple sclerosis (MS) strike women twice as often as men. Primary progressive MS, though, affects men and women in nearly equal numbers. Researchers don’t know why it happens, but here’s what scientists understand about this type:

The ‘Equal Opportunity’ MS

For people with primary progressive MS, there are no attacks followed by later improvement, as in the more common forms of MS. Symptoms steadily get worse from the time they’re diagnosed.

The gender differences in this type of the disease seem to vary by age group. In the largest studies done so far, scientists kept tabs on hundreds of men and women with primary progressive MS for decades. They found:

Under age 30, equal numbers of men and women had the condition.

There were more women than men who got it after age 45.

Almost two women for each man were diagnosed with primary progressive MS after age 50 — still short of the rates in other forms of MS.

This type of MS is also unique in how severe its symptoms are. MS in men is usually worse than in women. But large studies of primary progressive MS show:

Early on, the symptoms were just as severe and got worse just as fast for men as for women.

After about 20 years of living with primary progressive MS, men’s disease finally began to “outrun” the women’s in terms of how bad their symptoms were.

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