The Tie That Binds All Autoimmune Diseases Together By Koby Taylor, PharmD As a pharmacist, I don’t have many patients who aren’t suffering from some form of an autoimmune disease. Statistically, autoimmune diseases are on the rise in the United States, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the stress of recent years hasn’t increased this statistic. By definition, autoimmune means the body’s immune system attacks its own healthy cells, resulting in an autoimmune disease. Some commonly known autoimmune diseases are rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, celiac disease, Graves’ disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel disease. While every autoimmune disease is different by name, autoimmune diseases affect every system of the body: circulatory, digestive, endocrine, integumentary (hair, skin and nails), immune, muscular, nervous, renal, reproductive, respiratory, and skeletal. Symptoms of autoimmune disease can vary widely, but they do have many similarities, and one common similarity is inflammation. 66 www.sghealthandwellnessmagazine.com
Figuring Out the Why and How It’s no secret among the medical community and autoimmune patients that autoimmune disease is a mysterious and mischievous house guest. If you fall down and the result is a broken arm, you know exactly how and why the event happened. You would also race to get your arm treated. Autoimmune disease is not so simple. It’s slow moving, slow to show symptoms, and in most cases, it’s rarely known exactly why your autoimmune disease presented itself. Could a diagnosis also be pointed to an underlying trauma? Sure. Family genetics? Yes. Environmental toxin exposure? Again, yes. Stress? Absolutely. But autoimmune disease can also appear out of nowhere, leaving you bewildered as to how or why it’s happening. What is more, having a predisposition to autoimmune disease could be caused by your age, gender, and ethnicity. For example, Graves’ disease is more common among
women than men. However, AfricanAmerican and Asian/Pacific Islander women are at higher risk for multiple sclerosis. While it can appear at any age, it is far more likely to strike adults between twenty and forty years of age and is more common in women than men. With so many anomalies, figuring out the why and how are almost impossible. If you are someone who is dealing with an autoimmune disease, chances are that by the time you figure out your illness, you’ve left the how and why behind and are running toward “What do I do now?” Treating One Common Symptom May Help Treat Them All To describe symptoms for each and every autoimmune disease would require volumes of medical notes and research. But there is one symptom that stands out above them all—one symptom that is the common thread tying all autoimmune diseases together—
