Get your own Free Home PageINTRODUCTION.
The author of this survey is not a doctor or medical researcher. The data presented here is for information and is not intended as medical advice. This survey is written for people with MS, in terms familiar to the average reader.
No one knows for sure what causes MS. One current theory is that MS is due, in part, to an inherited susceptability and, in part, to exposure to a "trigger" which activates the disease. It is the trigger which is of interest in this survey. The inherited characteristic cannot be changed but if the trigger can be identified then possibly MS could be prevented and perhaps controlled in people who currently have the disease. Finding that trigger is the primary purpose of the MS survey.
There are many people with MS who claim to have found alternative treatments which greatly improved their condition. Those claims are generally dismissed by the medical community, as anectdotal evidence. Since MS is an unpredictable disease, they reason that anyone who recovers could be just lucky, and that whatever treatment they were using had nothing to do with their recovery. It is the second purpose of the MS survey to determine which, if any, of those treatments are truly helpful for people with MS.
SURVEY STRATEGY
The survey strategy is to search for differences in the background of people with MS compared to people without MS. First a list of possible triggers is created. Then questions are developed to determine the extent to which the respondents have been exposed to them. Next we run the survey. Answers are solicited from people with MS and people without MS. If any of the suspected triggers do play a role in the development of MS then they should appear in different proportions among people with MS than among the general public. For example, if dental fillings contribute to the development of MS, then there should be a larger proportion of people with fillings among the group with MS, since people who don't have fillings would be less likely to get the disease.( This is just an illustration. Actually, fillings do not appear to be significantly more common among people with MS.)
When a difference does occur in the incidence of a suspected trigger, the next step is to determine how significant it is. If 26% of people with MS eat a diet low in saturated fat, while 47% of people without MS eat such a diet, is that significant or is it just luck? Fortunately statistics gives us a tool for determining the probability of such an occurrence happening by chance. It's a bit like calculating the odds on drawing the Ace of hearts from a deck of cards. The method is called "hypothesis testing for differences of proportions". It is covered in most textbooks on statistics and software is available to simplify the number crunching. When the likelyhood of a chance occurrence is low we can probably safely say that the result is not due to luck. Something else must be the reason. Although, this does not prove that our suspected trigger is the culprit, it does lend support to that claim. Future surveys can then be targeted at specific areas to reinforce the earlier findings or dismiss them.
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