How Can Speech Therapy Help With Multiple Sclerosis?

Multiple sclerosis is a condition that can affect your sight, movement, and communication.

It can also impact how you eat and drink, which means that the symptoms can drastically affect your day to day living activities.

Scientists are hard at work looking for a cure, so in the meantime, the focus is on symptom management.

You’ll probably be working with a variety of healthcare professionals as part of your care team if you are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Speech therapists are a vital part of that team, especially if you’re experiencing any communication or swallowing challenges.

Consider Sol Speech and Language Therapy, if you’re looking for a speech pathologist in the Austin, Texas area.

We have an experienced and caring team of speech therapists ready to support your healing journey.

In this article, we’re taking a closer look at multiple sclerosis and how a speech pathologist can help treat some of the symptoms cause by MS.

What Is Multiple Sclerosis?

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic, progressive condition where your immune system damages the layer of myelin around your nerve fibers.

This process is called demyelination.

The damage caused by your immune system creates inflammation and temporary lesions on your nerve fibers.

Over time, these lesions can become permanent due to the accumulation of scar tissue that your body creates in the healing process.

These lesions interfere with the messaging between your brain and spinal cord, which then affects your motor skills.

Ongoing research is looking for a cure, but in the meantime, treatment of multiple sclerosis focuses on symptom management.

How To Know If You Have Multiple Sclerosis

Like many progressive conditions, the symptoms of multiple sclerosis often begin mildly.

It’s difficult to predict whether the condition will progress slowly or quickly.

Common early symptoms of multiple sclerosis include:

• Eye pain
• Poor balance
• Leg weakness
• Tingling or numbness without an obvious trigger

It’s also possible to experience some of these symptoms, and then not experience anything for months at a time.

That’s called a flare-up, and it is possible to go years between flare ups.

But, these symptoms can have many different causes.

So if you’re feeling them, it doesn’t mean that you definitely have multiple sclerosis.

If you’re worried, a neurologist can examine you to determine what’s happening.

Common diagnostic tests include:

• MRI scan
• Optical coherence tomography
• Spinal tap
• Visual evoked potentials test
• Blood tests

These tests are required to rule out other conditions that may be contributing to your symptoms.

Based on those tests, your doctor can generally tell if you have multiple sclerosis.

But this is a speech therapy blog, not a neurology blog.

General Signs Of Multiple Sclerosis

Let’s look at other general signs that can be symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

These include:

• Fatigue
• Double vision
• Blurry vision
• Acute or chronic pain
• Tremors
• Sleep issues
• Difficulty with bladder control
• Cognitive difficulties relating to memory, concentration and word finding

Speech Related Signs Of Multiple Sclerosis

We talked a lot about the general signs of multiple sclerosis, but let’s look at how it can affect your ability to communicate.

Multiple sclerosis can lead to a particular speech disorder called dysarthria, which is when the muscles you use for speaking are weak.

This is most often due to damage to your brain, which in this case is caused by the lesions in your brain.

Dysarthria can cause slurred speech, changes in the volume of your speech, and scanning speech.

Scanning speech is characterized by long pauses between words or syllables while you speak.

RELEATED ARTICLE: Speech Therapy For Traumatic Brain Injury Recovery In Adults

Swallowing Related Signs Of Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis can also cause difficulty swallowing.

The intensity of the symptoms depends on the progression of your condition, and can come and go with your flare ups.

Common signs of multiple sclerosis that impact your ability to swallow include:

• Feeling like food is stuck in your throat
• Feeling like food or drink is coming back up
• Difficulty chewing
• Coughing during or after eating and drinking
• Taking longer than usual to finish meals
• Difficulty keeping food or drink in your mouth

If you’re not careful, difficulty swallowing due to multiple sclerosis can lead to food or drink getting into your windpipe and lungs.

You might not notice it at first, but this can lead to bacterial infections if you’re not careful.

You can also get malnutrition if you’re not eating enough, dehydration if you’re not drinking enough fluids, and potentially choke.

What Causes Multiple Sclerosis?

Like we said before, multiple sclerosis is caused by damage to the layer of myelin that protects the nerve fibers of your brain, optic nerve, and spinal cord.

Research is ongoing to understand exactly what causes this damage, but presently it is believed that it is your immune system that attacks your myelin.

Demyelination occurs as your myelin is damaged, and this causes the symptoms of your multiple sclerosis during a flare up.

Demyelination can then go into remission as your body regrows a new layer of myelin, but sometimes this process can create scar tissue and chronic inflammation.

This occurs when your flare up becomes a permanent state of neurological impairment.

We don’t yet know what causes your immune system to do this.

But it’s thought to be environmental.

Some other risk factors that may increase your risk of developing multiple sclerosis include:

• Obesity
• Certain infections
• Smoking
• Certain other autoimmune disorders, like type 1 diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis

Speech Therapy For Multiple Sclerosis

Like many other conditions, speech therapy can help manage your symptoms if you have multiple sclerosis.

The first thing your speech therapist will do is conduct a thorough evaluation to understand your strengths and areas of concern.

This will be the foundation of the custom treatment plan they will create for you, to address your unique needs.

If you have multiple sclerosis, chances are you will need support with speaking and communicating, or swallowing.

Your speech therapist will work with you to focus on addressing each area of support you need.

This may include:

• Managing dysarthria
• Improving articulation
• Improving oral muscle control
• Building swallowing skills
• And more

The goal is to help you continue to eat, and communicate, with confidence.

Book Your Appointment With Our Speech Therapy Clinic Today

You can see that there are many ways that speech therapy can help support and manage your symptoms if you have multiple sclerosis.

It’s a challenging condition, but with professional support you can improve your quality of life.

At Sol Speech And Language Therapy, we’re here to help.

Book your appointment with Sol Speech And Language Therapy today.