Research shows that treatment at the first sign of disease may be best for most patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Sheila Halloran Skowyra was coming up on one of her busiest weeks at work when she woke up with numbness in her legs and feet. “It was more like pins and needles. I could walk around fine, so I figured it was just a pinched nerve,” says Skowyra, 37, an assignment editor at a Boston TV station and mother of two young children.

The symptoms persisted, but Skowyra powered through, overseeing coverage of the Boston Marathon and celebrating Easter and her younger daughter’s fourth birthday. When she went to the doctor’s office midweek, an exam and bloodwork found nothing alarming.

But by the following Monday, Skowyra could barely walk and felt like she had a band wrapped around her waist. She dropped her children off at school and headed straight to the hospital.

A subsequent MRI showed she had multiple lesions on her spinal cord, as well as older-looking lesions on her brain—telltale signs of multiple sclerosis (MS). Although Skowyra had worked on some stories about MS, she knew few specifics of the disease. She was soon to learn that MS is a chronic condition in which the immune system produces inflammation in the central nervous system, resulting in damaged nerves, potentially significant disability, and increased risk of mortality.

Disease severity and symptoms vary from person to person, but MS commonly causes problems with vision, walking, and balance, as well as unusual fatigue, pain, muscle weakness or spasms, numbness and tingling, bladder or bowel dysfunction, and cognitive and emotional changes such as depression and anxiety.

Skowyra was told she had relapsing-remitting MS (the most common form of the disease), in which attacks, or flare-ups, can occur at any time, followed by periods of partial or complete remission. “I was worried about the effect it would have on my children if I became immobile or disabled,” Skowyra says. That concern informed her decisions when it came time to pick a medication.

Her neurologist recommended two disease-modifying therapies (DMTs): a daily pill that has been around for about nine years and a newer drug that is administered twice a year through intravenous infusions. Skowyra chose the latter because it had proved highly effective in clinical trials at preventing attacks and seemed like it would suit her busy schedule. She had her first infusion in June. “I wanted to get ahead of this [disease] and treat it aggressively,” Skowyra says. “I wasn’t willing to wait and see if I had another attack.”

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