Our body’s protection system which identifies a disease causing agent and kills it, is called the immune system. Due to some mechanisms yet to be understood, the immune system under certain circumstances mistakes the healthy cells of our body as threats. When such an undesirable hostile situation arises, a patient is said to be suffering from a type of autoimmune disorders.
Common Symptoms of Autoimmune Disorders:
- Fatigue
- Malaise
- Swelling
- High body temperature or fever
- Changes in weight
- Stiffness and weakness in muscles and joints
- Extreme sensitivity to cold in feet and hands
- High or low blood pressure
- Digestive problems
- Depression
- Irritability
- Anxiety
- Increase in size of a tissue or organ
- Destruction of a tissue or organ
- Changes in blood sugar
- Infertility
Every disorder has its own unique set of symptoms related with the organ first targeted by it. The list of symptoms becomes longer as the disease progresses and affects rest of the healthy cells and tissues of the body.
List of Accepted Autoimmune Disorders:
- Ankylosing spondylitis
- Alopecia areata
- Dermatomyositis
- Crohns Disease
- Goodpasture’s Syndrome
- Type 1 diabetes
- Hashimoto’s Disease
- Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura
- Graves Disease
- Guillain-Barre Syndrome
- Mixed connective tissue disease
- Lupus Erythematosus
- Myasthenia gravis
- Multiple sclerosis
- Pemphigus vulgeris
- Narcolepsy
- Psoriasis
- Pernicious anaemia
- Primary biliary cirrhosis
- Psoriatic arthritis
- Polymyositis
- Rheumatoid arthritis
- Sjogren’s syndrome
- Relapsing polychondritis
- Wegener’s granulomatosis
- Vasculitis
- Temporal arthritis
- Ulcerative colitis
Some of the diseases which are suspected to be of autoimmune category are vitiligo, schizophrenia, stiff person syndrome, sarcoidosis, scleroderma, neuromyotonia, morphea, Kawasaki disease, interstitial cystitis , IgA nephropathy, endometriosis, hidradenitis suppurativa, chagas disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Facts about these Disorders:
- These diseases are one among the top ten leading causes of death in women up to 65 years.
- The areas in the world affected with infectious diseases report fewer cases of these types of disease and vice-versa.
- Men suffer from fewer types of these diseases when compared to women. But the severity of these diseases is high in them.
- As the cases are unknown, there is no cure for these diseases and they can only be treated with medicines called immunosuppressants. As the name suggests, these drugs try to decrease the efficacy of the immune system.
