Will my Fingers get better?

Here is My Question:
I was had my first clinical symptoms in 2010 had an MRI with active lesions. The symptoms were tingling in the left side of my body, took 5g cortisone the symptoms almost fully subsided. In 2012 i had blurred visions and the diagnosis of MS was affirmed. I started Gilenya and after that my MRI has always been almost stable with little new non-active lesions. The problem is that I have a neurological deficit in the tips of my left fingers and I don't know if they could ever improve or not. I do have cervical lesions.

Answer:
Thank you for the detailed description of your problem. When you state that, "you have a  neurological deficit in the tips of [your] left fingers", I assume you are describing numbness or a loss of discriminative sensation. Some people describe the fingertips feeling larger or the skin as being thicker. If the "neurological deficit" involves all of the finger of your left hand, it is almost certainly related to the spinal cord lesion mentioned in your message. If the deficit involves a more restricted pattern, the cause could be something as simple as carpal tunnel syndrome (thumb and index finger and possibly middle finger) or an ulnar neuropathy (ring finger and little finger), both treatable conditions. If you have this kind of restricted pattern of involvement in your left hand, you need to be evaluated for these non-MS related causes.

Let's assume for the purposes of your question that the cause of these symptoms is your MS. Whether this symptom can improve depends on the duration of the symptoms and the extent of damage to the involved region in the spinal cord. Generally speaking, persistent symptoms present for more than 6 months rarely resolve, although they may evolve and become either less or more noticeable; by less noticeable we usually mean more intermittent, less prone to worsening or simply a symptom that you are able to suppress and ignore; by more noticeable we are usually describing abnormal sensations that evolve to develop painful characteristics such as burning, deep aching or stabbing discomfort. If and when people develop symptoms with these painful characteristics, we often offer them treatment with medications (e.g. gabapentin, pregabalin and others) to help block the painful characteristics.

Hope this helps.

Revere P (Rip) Kinkel, MDProfessor of Clinical Neurosciences
Director of the Multiple Sclerosis Program
Clinical Neurosciences Director
University of California San Diego
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