Helping young people with MS
Though MS is rare in children, there are thought to be over 25,000 persons under the age of 18 who have symptoms that mimic MS. MS is notoriously hard to diagnose in adults, and the disease is even more difficult to identify in boys and girls, where it often mimics other childhood neurological disorders. Even if a child is properly diagnosed, doctors often have little experience treating children with MS and the drugs currently available for MS have not been extensively tested in children.
Funding from the Promise: 2010 Campaign established a national collaboration to support children with MS and related disorders: the Pediatric MS Centers of Excellence. These six centers are treating children under 18 who have MS and other central nervous system demyelinating diseases. Read more about Pediatric MS Centers of Excellence and Pediatric MS.
The centers also are gathering critical data to ultimately help researchers worldwide better understand the course that MS takes from the very beginning of the disease, when symptoms first appear. They are implementing a uniform database to collect information that will be invaluable to MS researchers.