What's an Autoimmune Disease?
What happens when your immune system goes in overdrive? What happens when your immune system doens’t protect you? What do you do about it?
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
Your immune system protects you from disease and infection. How? The immune system protects by attacking foreign invaders so you don’t get sick. If you have an autoimmune disease, your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake and this causes you to be sick. The immune system is “overactive” when you have an autoimmune disease.
AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE
An autoimmune disease is a condition in which your immune system mistakenly attacks your own healthy body. Proteins called autoantibodies attack and destroy healthy cells which makes you sick. The immune system thinks your healthy cells are foreign invaders and starts going crazy trying to attack them. This crazy attacking of the healthy cells makes the person feel sick.
SYMPTOMS
There are more than 80 types of autoimmune diseases and many have similar symptoms. The classic sign of an autoimmune disease is inflammation. Often, the first symptoms are fatigue, muscle aches, low grade fever, and general malise or flu like symptoms.
Symptom’s depend on what are of the body is being attacked. For example, stomach, skin, kidney’s, thyroid, blood pressure, etc. Each area has a whole host of symptoms.
The diseases may also have flare-ups, when they get worse, and remissions, when symptoms get better or disappear.
TREATMENT
Treatment depends on the disease but in most cases one important goal is to reduce inflammation. Sometimes doctors prescribe corticosteroids or other immune suppressing drugs that reduce your immune response in an effort to quiet the disease down. Other drugs are prescribed to treat and reduce symptoms based on what system of the body is being attacked.
CAUSE
No one is sure what causes autoimmune diseases. They do tend to run in families. Women, particularly African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American women have a higher risk for some autoimmune diseases.
TYPES
Autoimmune diseases can affect many parts of the body. The type of autoimmune disease you have depends on which part of the body is attacked. Examples of autoimmune diseases include:
Rheumatoid arthritis
Systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus)
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)
Multiple sclerosis (MS)
Type 1 diabetes mellitus
Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy
Psoriasis
Sjogrens
Autoimmune Autonomic Neuropathy
Addison’s
Vasculitis
Chron’s
Hashimotos
Graves
Guillain-Barre syndrome
Celiac
Peripheral Neuropathy
When I inform others I have sjogren’s and autoimmune autonomic neuropathy (dysautonomia) people have no idea what I’m talking about! The best way to describe it is I have a “bad immune system” and it makes me sick.
Hopefully this post will help with some further explanations. Feel free to add your condition or any that I have missed in the comment section. Keep fighting! Keep sharing!
