Lupus

                  Lupus

Lupus is a disease that is unfamiliar to many. It's difficult to diagnose and often misunderstood.

Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease that can target your joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, heart and lungs. The great majority of people affected are women. For reasons that aren’t clear, lupus develops when the immune system attacks your body’s own tissues and organs.

Three main types of lupus exist — systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), discoid lupus erythematosus and drug-induced lupus. 

Of these, SLE is the most common and serious form of the disease, frequently causing swollen, painful joints, skin rash, extreme fatigue and kidney damage.

In a normal immune system, antibodies stave off germs and viruses. With lupus, the immune system does not function properly, becoming instead an autoimmune system unable to differentiate between healthy tissue and bacteria. Autoantibodies generated by the autoimmune system attack healthy tissue, destroying it and causing pain and discomfort throughout the body.

Symptoms

The symptoms of lupus are both internal and external and imitate those of other diseases and disorders, such as fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes. Because of its similarity to other diseases, additional testing, including blood and urine, are needed to aid the doctor in properly diagnosing the disease.

Symptoms may show up quickly or gradually. The length of an episode or flare can range from short to long periods and the intenseness of the effects during that period ranges from mild to severe.

Episodes fluctuate so there are times when the disease subsides and there are no adverse affects.

External Effects

External symptoms involve the skin, scalp, joints, fingers and toes. Exposure to the sun or bright light can exasperate the disease causing a rash or lesions on the skin. Joints may become swollen and stiff, fingers and toes may become discolored during bouts of cold or during a stressful episode, skin may acquire scaly, raised patches and hair loss may occur.

Internal Effects

Because the immune system is affected, infections can easily occur. Additionally, nasal and mouth sores may appear, inflammation to vital organs occurs and headaches, dizziness, anemia and bruising may be experienced.

Treatment

Doctors who treat Lupus most often are Rheumatologists. Dermatologists, Internists, Nephrologists, Neurologists, Cardiologists, and Psychiatrists may also be involved in Lupus treatment depending on which organs are affected.

A natural treatment for lupus rashes is usually avoiding direct exposure to sunlight. While this might sound easy during the cold season, it becomes incredibly hard to conform to during the summer months. This is why corticosteroids treatment is used for the rash. Corticosteroid creams can be prescribed by dermatologists or lupus specialists and they can be found in pharmacies. Applied to the affected areas, these creams reduce the pain and remove the unsightly redness of the skin.

Giving up certain pills also constitutes a simple, natural treatment of lupus. However, treating drug-induced lupus requires professional assistance; therefore it is recommended to consult your physician for clear indications on what pills you should leave out of your current treatment or which medication can be changed for a more efficient one.

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are a frequent component of the lupus treatment. Their inhibitory features help maintaining the normal functionality of several internal organs, especially the kidneys. This aspect is very important, since kidney disease is a common symptom in male lupus patients. Ibuprofen and naproxen are probably the most popular NSAIDs used largely world-widely.

Since lupus is best described as an autoimmune condition, immuno-modulating drugs are also used in the SLE treatment. These drugs (Cellcept, Cytoxan, etc.) prevent the autoimmune behavior of the immune system. Another benefit of this treatment would be that it helps doctors reduce the use of corticosteroids in some lupus treatments.

It is important to understand that surgery is rarely recommended as one of the lupus treatment options. However, when kidney failure occurs in a lupus patient or if one of the hips is affected by avascular necrosis (a mass amount of cells die due to circulation problems caused by lupus), surgery is required. Between 5 and 10% of the lupus sufferers are listed for splenectomy. This surgical intervention consists in the partial or complete removal of the spleen and in some cases it’s the only option available to avoid further complications caused by lupus.

For now, lupus remains an autoimmune disease with unknown causes or cures. It affects one in one thousand people, most of whom are women. It is not a contagious disease and its symptoms can remain dormant for varying periods of time before manifesting again in flare-ups.