The immune system is supposed to be the thing that protects you from disease, but what about when it decides you’re the disease and attacks you like you’re the enemy? There are a lot of different autoimmune conditions, each with their own symptoms, but most come with a general malaise that may not make life impossible but can certainly wear you down and make it harder.
Some of the most famous autoimmune conditions include rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, celiac disease and lupus. As you can see, there’s a diverse range. The first affects the joints, the second stems from problems with blood sugar, the third is a gastrointestinal response and the fourth can cause rashes, fever, tiredness, and aches and pains all around the body.
That just goes to show the diversity of autoimmune conditions. They show up in pretty much every body part in one way or another, causing different symptoms and therefore requiring different treatments. For example, diabetes may require insulin to be managed effectively, but you’re not going to use insulin to treat arthritis.
We don’t know exactly what causes autoimmune diseases or what combination of genetics and environmental factors may set the immune system aflame. Many of the conditions are also hard to diagnose thanks to the generic nature of symptoms like aches and tiredness, and the fact that those symptoms are often transient in nature, flaring for a while before disappearing again.
Some treatments are specific, like insulin, but others are more general. Immunosuppressant drugs can be used to calm the immune system down, but they mean it will be harder for your body to fight off any other diseases that you may develop. There’s a lot of research being done to try to find new approaches that may work better, including stem cell therapy.
One experiment into treatments for type 1 diabetes looked into whether the pancreatic cells destroyed by the immune system, and therefore responsible for the pancreas not producing insulin, could be replaced with stem cells (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01842-x). There have also been some good results in treating rheumatoid conditions (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrrheum.2017.7), but there’s still a lot of research to go into potential risks as well as efficacy.
Autoimmune disorders can be particularly frustrating because they seem so intangible in both cause and treatment. Let’s hope scientists can continue to improve their understanding and their approach.
