All about lupus

The precise cause of lupus is unknown. Scientists generally believe that some people are born with a genetic predisposition for lupus, but environmental factors are believed to play a critical role in triggering the disease. These factors may include infections, antibiotics (especially penicillin drugs), ultraviolet light, extreme stress, certain drugs and hormones, especially the female reproductive hormones. Some research suggests that lupus autoantibodies may be triggered by a viral infection (perhaps transmitted via a tick bite) that causes excess death of lymph cells. As these lymph cells break up, other immune cells mistake their disintegrating membranes for foreign bodies and start to attack them. Even though lupus may be triggered by the body over-reacting to a viral illness, lupus itself is not infectious, and you cannot `catch? it from someone who has the condition.

Symptoms
The number and type of SLE symptoms vary widely from patient to patient, and symptoms tend to wax and wane. Patterns of inactive disease and lupus ‘flares’ generally establish themselves within the first two years after diagnosis. Nevertheless, lupus can be unpredictable; symptoms as well as the flare cycle may change at any time.

The most common symptoms, each affecting more than 50 percent of lupus sufferers, are:

• Arthralgia (joint pain)
• Arthritis (joint warmth, swelling and redness)
• Unexplained fever (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit/37.7 Celsius)
• Extended or severe fatigue
• Skin rashes, classically associated with a butterfly-shaped rash across the nose and cheeks
• Anaemia (abnormally low red blood cell count)
• Kidney damage

Less common symptoms include:

• Pleurisy (chest pain when breathing deeply, caused by inflammation of the lungs’ lining)
• Photosensitivity (oversensitivity to sunlight)
• Alopecia (hair loss)
• Raynaud’s syndrome (fingers turning white or blue in the cold)
• Seizures, psychosis, and other neuropsychiatric problems
• Mouth or nose ulcers
• Pericarditis (chest pain caused by inflammation of the heart lining)
• Phlebitis (blood clots)
• Miscarriages late in pregnancy

Diagnosis
Diagnosing SLE is not easy. Sometimes the disease announces itself decisively with a flare resembling an infection, but more often the disease spawns only vague waxing and waning symptoms – aches, rashes or fatigue – which get worse over the course of several years. Lupus symptoms can be easily confused with those of other diseases.

As yet, there is no single, definitive test for SLE. An initial diagnostic screening may include a complete blood count (anaemia with low white cells and low platelet counts are generally found), liver and kidney tests, blood tests for autoantibodies (an indicator of autoimmune disease), a syphilis test (a phenomenon of the disease is a false positive test for syphilis), a skin biopsy (usually shows the presence of LE cells, which are white blood cells containing antibody material), urinalysis (to detect possible kidney disease) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (a measure of inflammation).

read more:  previous | 1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  5 | next printer friendly send to a friend