When it comes to living with multiple sclerosis (MS), I must have seen just about every claimed correlation, suspected causation, purported symptom, and conspiracy theory out there — although I’m pretty sure I could find even more if I wished to spend my time looking down those rabbit holes.
Is There an ‘MS Personality’?
One thing that pops up now and again that interests me has to do with the personality traits of people living with MS. I recently came across one such study, published in January in Journal of the Neurological Sciences, that caught my eye. The synopsis of the research has both good news and bad news. The good? The study suggests that people with MS are, well … we’re nice.
Study Finds People With MS Are ‘Highly Agreeable’
The personality and neuropsychiatric aspects of people living with MS have implications for both our overall mental health and how we respond and react in our health-related behaviors. Researchers looked at nearly 400 people with MS who had psychometric testing within two years of diagnosis. This testing included several standard psychological methods. They found that more than half (53.7 percent) of participants were “highly agreeable” people, which seems like a pretty nice thing to say about us as a lot. But we seem to be agreeable in spite of rather than because of MS. Women with MS, by the way, were found to be “more agreeable and conscientious” by the researchers than were men. I’d argue the idea, but that wouldn’t be very agreeable of me.
Study Also Finds Many Have Depression or Anxiety
On the not-so-good side, about half of participants (50.5 percent) experienced anxiety, and 22.6 percent, depression. What’s more, 60.5 percent of the people studied have impaired “IPS.” While I thought IPS might be an abbreviation for interpersonal skills, which I thought an odd matrix to measure, it doesn’t. IPS stands for information processing speed, and it essentially describes how long it takes for a person to perform a mental task. If you’ve ever had cognitive function testing done, you’ve probably had your IPS measured. Interesting, I thought, that a majority of people with the disease showed impaired IPS within those first couple of years after diagnosis — evidence, perhaps, that the disease had been well active on our brains before diagnosis. The study also found that “neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion had moderate-high correlations with anxiety and depression” in people with MS. I’m not sure what the punch line would be, but “a conscientious neurotic extravert walks into a bar …” seems like a pretty good setup to a joke.
Could This Information Help Us Find Better Coping Mechanisms?
In reading these findings, I was happy and concerned at the same time. These results may help us and our medical teams to understand not only what is going on inside our brains, but how it might affect how we cope with our diagnosis and the changes it may make to our future lives and selves. The study’s conclusion states that “[e]arly identification of these neuropsychiatric traits in [persons with] MS may improve treatment adherence, symptoms, and QOL [quality of life].” Here’s hoping! Wishing you and your family the best of health. Cheers, Trevis
