Today we're looking at a disease called MS. That stands for multiple sclerosis, a disease that can make it difficult to walk or even talk.


CAROLYNN SALZMANN: The hardest thing about MS is the uncertainty that goes along with it. You really can't go to anyone and say what's going to happen to me in the next five years or what's going to happen to me in the next 10 years.

HELEN GESAPINI: It is very hard to live with it when you just don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. You get up one day and you may feel a lot worse than you did the day before or you might wake up and feel a lot better, but there's no way you're ever going to be back to normal.

NATASHA JOHNSON: Helen Gesapini and Carolynn Salzmann are among the estimated 15,000 Australians who have multiple sclerosis. They're at the opposite ends of the MS spectrum.

Helen has been living with MS for more than 30 years, Carolynn for just one year, but both share the frustration of suffering a disease with no known cause, no cure and no predictable path of progression.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR TREVOR KILPATRICK: Typically it comes in remissions and relapses.

NATASHA JOHNSON: MS is believed to be an auto-immune disease in which the immune cells attack the myelin, or casing around nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, causing varying degrees of symptoms in different people which can ultimately result in blindness and paralysis.

PROFESSOR TONY McMICHAEL: Epidemiologists have known for a number of decades that in various places around the world, but particularly in Australia, as you move from low to high latitude, the rates of multiple sclerosis increase.

NATASHA JOHNSON: In fact, Australia has the strongest latitude gradient in the world, meaning that the number of MS cases per 100,000 people increases 7-fold as you move from northern Queensland to Tasmania.

Just why no-one knows. But researchers from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health and the Royal Melbourne Hospital hope to find out.

In conjunction with colleagues in Hobart, Newcastle and Brisbane, they're about to start counting and studying new cases of MS occurring along the east coast over the next five years.

NATASHA JOHNSON: With so little medical certainty, people living with MS explore all sorts of exercise, diet and alternative therapies to combat their disease.

If this new study can pinpoint environmental causes, it could lead to strategies to prevent the disease, new treatments or even a cure.

As Carolynn Salzmann and Helen Gesapini continue to live with the uncertainty of MS, they feel confident that there will soon be more answers to their questions.

HELEN GESAPINI: The research is pretty exciting because things are getting much closer to a cure.

CAROLYNN SALZMANN: I'm lucky I'm 25, I'm in the earliest stages of the disease. And people have said to me, "Within your lifetime there should be a cure for it." That's what I hope for really.