On here you will find information on some of the medications related to MS that I have encountered and my experience of them. The information will be from reliable sources mainly from the Internet but my personal experiences are just that my personal experiences and opinions.
Steroids
Steroids are a drugs which are used to treat many different conditions and come in numerous forms. In MS they are used to treat relapses. They can be given orally intravenously but I will just be discussing the oral steroids as that is what I have had, they are prednisolone and methylprednisolone. Methylprednisolone is what is recommended by the NICE guidance for management of MS in primary and secondary care.
For more information on the NICE guidance see http://www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/live/10930/29199/29199.pdf - for the public
http://www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/live/10930/29202/29202.pdf - what medical professionals use
So what do steroids do in MS?
Well from everything I have read so far (I haven't delved to deeply into the technical stuff of steroids) we don't really know exactly how steroids work in MS. How the MS trust explain things is that steroids probably act by partly suppressing the immune system and/or by reducing fluid accumulation around the site of nerve damage. Studies have shown that they can help speed up recovery from relapse but they do not reduce the degree of damage by the relapse or long term progression of MS. http://www.mstrust.org.uk/atoz/prednisolone.jsp
You can also look at http://www.mssociety.org.uk/about_ms/relapses/steroids.html to see their information on steroids.
So how did I find steroids?
My first experience of steroids was much better then the second. I was given given a two week reducing course of Prednisolone. It did seem to help me but who knows if things would of improved as quickly without it or if they would of taken longer. I did not got any side effects in fact I felt fantastic on them, I had lots more energy and oopmh which was rather nice. So apart from tasting nasty my experience was pretty good of I
Recently I had the recommended five day course of methylprednisolone but my experience of this wasn't so good and unfortunately it didn't seem to have much of an impact on my relapse. I didn't get the extra energy I got with the Prednisolone and I suffered with a lot of indigestion whilst taking these. Oh and they taste disgustingly bitter. To get round the taste of them I had several recommendations from other people on the MS society forum such as taking them with fresh pineapple chunks, sucking murray mints and starbursts (formally known as opal fruits). What I ended up doing is putting them on a spoon of honey and washing it down with milk. Kind of helped. I did mean to try murray mints but kept forgetting to buy them. My Neurologist felt that the methylprednsiolone didn't have much of an effect on my relapse because she felt it was triggered by a urinary tract infection which wasn't treated for long enough with antibiotics. Who knows though. Friends who have had it before for relapses said that it helped speed up their recovery from a relapse really quickly. It does all vary from person to person and relapse to relapse.
