In an autoimmune disease, your body, namely your immune systems, makes the mistake of misrecognition of a certain part or tissue in your body. It thinks it is a microbe and not part of your body. So it attacks it with antibodies. This causes an inflammation in that part of your body and symptoms of disease. This is a general simplified explanation of what goes on in an autoimmune disease.
There is a long list of autoimmune diseases actually. Examples of autoimmune diseases on that list are rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis and lupus and vasculitis. Doctors diagnose them and sort them out mostly based on the clinical features and on examining patients in addition, of course, to running some lab tests also.
One of the most important questions that a patient with a newly diagnosed autoimmune disease will ask me is this:
Doc, if I have an autoimmune disease, my immune system will attack any part of my body any time?
My immune system will wake up the next morning to randomly attack some other part of my body?
Could it affect my eye? My brain? Or any other part, depending on the mood of the immune system today?
The answer is: Definitely NO
Our immune systems are neat and organized even when they get sick and do an autoimmune disease. What does that mean?
It means that in any autoimmune disease, there is a certain, a very specific part in your immune system that has goes wrong and makes your immune system fail to recognize very specific organs or tissues in your body and so it attacks them. They are the only parts of your body that are on the list in this disease. The immune system will attack only those organs and will not attack any other organs randomly.
So if we say that in a given disease, the immune can attack the joint or the skin but it would not attack the lung, this means that in that disease the patient might have inflammation of the joint or the skin or both but he will never ever have inflammation of the lung because of that disease. And so on..
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This post was prepared and published by Dr. Hatem Eleishi. Dr. Hatem Eleishi is a professor of rheumatology at Cairo university (Egypt) and is especially dedicated to supporting arthritis patients with online educational videos and articles about arthritis causes and treatment. He also runs a rheumatology clinic in Cairo and a center for online medical consultations that, in addition to providing online rheumatology consultations, also provides online medical consultations in several different medical specialties by expert consultants from Egypt, Canada and the United States.
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