Still's disease is an autoimmune disease. The common thing that happens in any autoimmune rheumatic disease is that immune system fails to recognize patients of the body, joints and some other tissues sometimes, as part of the body and thinks they are microbes. So the immune system attacks them. So they get inflamed.

The most important symptom in Still's disease, in addition to the inflammation of the joints, we call this arthritis, is fever. The fever might reach up to 40 degrees and this would usually happen in the second half of the day and there might be a rash with this fever too. The real problem that patients with Still's disease face and that delays their diagnosis sometimes is that they might get a fever only with no arthritis that points to the possibility of Still's disease, and that their labs that reflect inflammation in the body are so high reflecting really intense inflammation and the count of their white blood cells is so high. Those signs, in medicine, point to the likely possibility of a blood cancer or some abscess somewhere in the body. For that reason, it is so common that patients take a long time doing many investigations to exclude a blood cancer, they can do a bone marrow biopsy even and also will take a lot of antibiotics for a suspected infection or abscess in the body.

Treatment of Still's disease at this point in time is by prescribing one or more medications from a family of medications called DMARDs, disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs. This is a big family of medications that we use to treat autoimmune rheumatic diseases.

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This info was provided 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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