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Common symptoms are muscle wasting, muscle weakness, fasiculations, swallowing and speech difficulties and muscle cramps.

Muscle wasting: This is often noticed first in one of the hands or in other muscles in a leg or arm, or sometimes in several different muscles at once.

Muscle weakness: This is usually most noticeable in a wasted limb. Muscle weakness can cause difficulties with performing tasks like undoing a bottle top or holding heavy objects, or with walking or climbing stairs.

Fasciculations: These are involuntary contractions of parts of a muscle just below the skin, which are sometimes felt as a little twitch under the skin. They occur because the nerve supply to the muscle is damaged.

Difficulty swallowing and with speech: At some stage in the disease, there can be problems with swallowing and speech. For some people, they may be the first problems to become apparent. Their medical name is bulbar palsy.

Muscle cramp or spasms: These may occur unexpectedly when a muscle is at rest, for example in bed or when it is suddenly contracted.

These symptoms are usually progressive - so that wasting or weakness first seen in one part of the body will spread to other parts of the body with time. However, many of the symptoms can be eased by a range of treatments (see later section entitled 'Treatment')
 
People with MND do not experience numbness or loss of feeling, though they may notice some tingling, especially in the arms.