Do You Have An Autoimmune Disease? 5 Red Flags
Autoimmune diseases are on the rise without stopping. Being attentive to certain symptoms, common to all of them, will help us detect them in time.
Autoimmune diseases are caused by an imbalance in our immune system. Instead of defending our body, it attacks cells and causes, among other symptoms, fatigue or sleep disorders.
In recent decades, the incidence of autoimmune diseases has tripled. The most common are: rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, psoriasis or hypothyroidism.
How to know if you have an autoimmune disease
There are more than 80 different autoimmune diseases.
But there are symptoms that are common to all of them and that can make us suspicious.
- Most suffer from intense fatigue unrelated to muscular effort. There is also usually a feeling of chronic malaise and general weakness.
- Those responsible for sleep disorders would be cytokines, messengers that help regulate sleep. They are produced in large quantities in inflammation and induce sleepiness.
- Asthenia, anorexia and weight loss indicate the possibility that we are suffering from an autoimmune disease.
- Especially in systemic autoimmune episodes of low- grade fever occur .
- Nonspecific gastrointestinal disturbances and changes in stool color, shape, and consistency are also alarm signals .
The first steps in diagnosing an autoimmune disease
Once an autoimmune disease has been diagnosed, the doctor will decide on the appropriate drug treatment. These are usually corticosteroid treatments, powerful immunosuppressive treatments (lupus, multiple sclerosis), with possible important side effects, or replacement (insulin in the case of diabetes, thyroid hormones in thyroiditis).
The high toxicity of some of these drugs leads to a search for alternatives. A work published in Nature in 2016 talks about research on nanopharmaceuticals that act specifically on regulatory T lymphocytes. And very promising, the fecal transplant.
Some healthy habits can help patients in managing their disease as they arrive news: avoid snuff (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis), the sun (lupus) and maintain adequate levels of vitamin D (lupus, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis) can help treatment.
