'Why Now?' New Dad Jack Osbourne Faces MS

ABC News (June 18, 2012)-At only 26 and a new father, Jack Osbourne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis earlier this spring.

The son of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne told People Magazine he was diagnosed only two weeks after his daughter, Pearl Clementine, was born.

"I was just angry and frustrated and kept thinking, 'Why now?'" Osbourne told the magazine. "I've got a family and that's what's supposed to be the most important thing."

While Osbourne is younger than the average patient who is newly diagnosed with MS, it is not by much. The average age at which a patient is diagnosed is 37.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that affects the brain and spinal cord. The disease attacks the myelin sheath, a protective covering that surrounds nerve cells, and approximately 400,000 Americans have MS, according to the National MS Society. About 200 people are newly diagnosed each week.

While the disease is degenerative, symptoms, which affect the muscles, bowel function, vision, nerve and sexual function and personality, can vary and range greatly in severity.

Because of the typical early onset of the disease, Osbourne, and many other newly diagnosed MS patients, are at the threshold of many life decisions, including career, marriage and children.

"People have spent their entire life up until the point of diagnosis imagining their life in a certain way, they have to interpret how they're going to let go of that picture and how they see themselves, and fit that new information into the sense of who they are," said Rosalind Kalb, a clinical psychologist and director of the Professional Resource Center at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. "It's a grieving process, and you can't move ahead on how you're going to live with MS until you spend a little time with the loss of a life without MS."

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