OK, so I had a acquaintance a while back who died (or so I suspect) from complications of “Multiple System Atrophy.” When I first heard about it, I did the cursory Googling for info and found out. . . not much, other than it’s a degenerative nerve condition, which I already knew.
Anyway, a few questions:
I got the impression that while he was slowly losing motor skills, that his mind was still functioning pretty well (similar to the way that ALS affects people). Is that reasonable to assume, or would his mental faculties have been deteriorating, too?
I was told by his caretaker that he wouldn’t be able to see me, but he could hear me. I’ve seen enough written by the experts to think of the eyes as being light-sensitve extensions of the brain, so I can see how that is plausible. Is that a common manifestation of this situation?
It’s predominately motor, autonomic and balance dysfunction, so in my opinion even the name is misleading; the “systems” that are failing are brain systems, with secondary peripheral (mostly motor and balance) peripheral consequences. To me the name sounds like various organs are crapping out, which is not correct. I think in some ways you could think of it as Parkinson disease plus some primary balance (cerebellar) and autonomic (BP regulation, e.g. like Shy-Drager) stuff tossed in.
Mild mental deterioration occurs in about a fifth of cases EMSA-SG: European Multiple System Atrophy Study Group > What is MSA but for the most part the expression of the disease is motor, cerebellar and autonomic dysfunction. Loss of vision does not sound typical for MSA from what I’ve read but I have no more expertise on this than you with the possible exception that I don’t have to translate some of the medicalese.
I suspect some of the intellectual deterioration might be secondary to a loss of input; any limiting condition (plus the drugs we treat 'em with) tends to do this.
There are many, many types of disorders which affect various parts of the brain and are poorly understood, so until this gets sorted out more, it’s more of a clinical syndrome than a tightly-defined disease related to a specific (or, at least) specifically-defined etiology.
I found this to be a nice summary: MSA