Nine-time Grand Slam champion Monica Seles has revealed she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis – a neuromuscular autoimmune disease – three years ago.<\/p>\n
The 51-year-old has chosen to go public with the rare long-term condition, which causes muscle weakness, to raise awareness before this month’s US Open.<\/p>\n
Seles first noticed symptoms of the condition, which can affect most parts of the body – including the muscles that control the eyes, around five years ago.<\/p>\n
“I would be playing [tennis] with some kids or family members, and I would miss a ball,” former world number one Seles told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I see two balls.’ These are obviously symptoms that you can’t ignore.<\/p>\n
“It took me quite some time to really absorb it, speak openly about it, because it’s a difficult one. It affects my day-to-day life quite a lot.”<\/p>\n
Seles decided to reveal her condition in the hope of using her platform to educate people about the disease, for which there is currently no cure.<\/p>\n
The American won eight major titles by the age of 19, after capturing her first aged 16 at the 1990 French Open.<\/p>\n
But she won just one more after she was stabbed with a knife by a fan during a match in Hamburg in 1993 and took time away from the sport to recover.<\/p>\n
Seles played her last match in 2003 having won 53 tournaments and spent 178 weeks at number one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nine-time Grand Slam champion Monica Seles has revealed she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis – a neuromuscular autoimmune…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-63509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}