Why Is MS Increasing Among Women?

For women, finding an answer is becoming more urgent by the day.

- Emily Abbate

"It all looks normal," Rebeckah Price's first optometrist told her on January 3, 2023. Inside the small, sterile room, the then 46-year-old yoga teacher and single mother of three was hunting for answers after the vision in her left eye rapidly deteriorated over the previous 30 days, leaving her scared. The vision in her eye was like a fogged bathroom mirror post-shower, one she wasn't able to wipe clear.

Price was referred to another eye specialist, then to a neuroophthalmologist. Finally, after an interminable six-hour wait inside a neurologist's office the following Tuesday, she got a two-word diagnosis that changed her life: multiple sclerosis (MS). "My heart sank," Price says. "I do all these wellness things. I didn't want to receive this [news], and so I told them 'maybe it's just stress,' and I went home."

By Valentine's Day, she was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS)-one of four types of MS, the others being clinically isolated syndrome (CIS), primary progressive MS (PPMS), and secondary progressive MS (SPMS).

Price isn't the only person who recently received this life-changing diagnosis. Cases are on the rise: As of 2023, 2.9 million people worldwide were living with the diseaseup from 2.3 million in 2013, per the MS International Federation. In the U.S., an estimated 1 million people had MS in 2019, which is about two times greater than reports from a national study from 1975. (The population has not also doubled in this time period; it went from roughly 216 million in 1975 to 328 million in 2019.) For Americans, the risk of developing MS is now about 1 in 333.

On a global scale, MS rates increased in every World Health Organization (WHO) region between 2013 and 2020, per a review in the National Library of Medicine using the Atlas of MS data.