Factors That Impact the Severity of Relapse:
- Size of lesion(s)
- Destructiveness of lesion(s)
- Location of lesion(s). For instance, in spinal cord, we tend to see more severe symptoms than in certain parts of the brain.
- Short-term treatments (eg steroids)
- Disease-modifying therapies
- The burden of pre-existing damage. This gets into the concept of neurologic reserve: If you have same size and type and destructiveness of a lesion in one person who has a greater pre-existing burden of disease compared to someone else who has very minimal pre-existing disease, that person who has less pre-existing disease might not experience quite as severe of symptoms as a person with larger existing burden of disease.
