Aaron Boster

typically around their 40s, started to have a slow, steady decline in neurological function, and they never had any clear-cut so-called attacks, where they got really bad over a couple days, and then it lasted for a couple weeks.

And we call that primary progressive MS.

If the human instead had a so-called attack, flare, exacerbation, relapse first, and that's where you lose a neurological function and you try to hide it from your family.

And after a couple of days, you got to come clean it like you can't feel your leg.

Well, then we call that a relapse.

And that person is said to have relapsing forms of MS.

they start to have a progression of disability, which perfectly matches primary progressive MS.

So there are those of us that believe that the form first of MS is this slow steady decline and that some patients skip or avoid the early relapsing phase, which is kind of like noise on top of the actual real disease.

And that's a concept that is not ubiquitously accepted by all MS neurologists, but they're wrong.

Absolutely.

So the word sclerosis is Greek for scar because God forbid we use like standard language, it would be way too easy for everybody to understand.

So multiple sclerosis is really a reference to back in the ancient days of yesteryear where people did like autopsies and they would say, oh my gosh, there are multiple scars here.

So if you think about our understanding of what causes MS is fledgling.

So what we think happens in MS is not a classic genetic condition.

So most people listening might think of like a genetic condition as like cystic fibrosis or like sickle cell anemia, where if you have it, a certain number of your kids are going to have it.

And in MS, it's not so straightforward.

But what it does mean is you probably have certain haplotypes of genes that encode for your immune system that you share with that greater population.

Then we believe that there's certain environmental risk factors which might increase or decrease a given human's risk to develop MS.

For example, exposure to smoke.

So firsthand or secondhand smoke can literally double an individual's risk to develop MS.