Dr. Paul opens a four-part series on autoimmunity, which now affects 23 to 24 million Americans, more than cancer. Autoimmune diseases have skyrocketed since the 1950s. The series covers what autoimmunity is, its causes, modern targeted therapies, and integrative treatment approaches.
Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health. I'm Dr. Paul, and today our topic is autoimmunity. We've got a lot of questions about autoimmunity. Don't know if we're gonna get to all of the questions because as I do sometimes, I put out the question on social media and we got a lot of responses. So we're gonna do our best, but we may break this up and do a couple of these. Autoimmunity is very common. And it is something that a lot of people struggle with. A lot of families have people with autoimmunity, and it's a good topic to kind of dive into. So what I'm gonna do today, which is a little bit of a new sort of format, but I think it'll help out a little bit with the organization, is I'm gonna put this into 4 chunks. And so we'll have a little transition between each of the 4 sections. And so we're gonna talk about first, what is autoimmunity and what are the major diseases associated with autoimmunity, just in case you may have one or may not know what they are, et cetera. Then second section, we wanna talk about what causes autoimmunity and how broadly the cause areas are that exist in humans and autoimmunity. And then the third and the fourth section, we wanna talk about therapies or treatments. So the third section will be your standard medical type therapies which includes some older and then some very newer targeted therapies. A lot of the newer therapies you see ads for on TV, for example. And then in the 4th section, we want to talk about what are integrative approaches to autoimmunity. And what I have a feeling that we'll wind up doing probably is we'll do this in 4 sections today. And based on all of the questions that have come in in the last just 24 hours since I kind of put this out there, we may drill down into some of these other therapies a little bit more deeply. Here in the first section, we want to talk about what is autoimmunity and what diseases are included. I just want to give you a flavor for how frequently autoimmunity comes up, how common it is, and all of that. When I talk about the references that I include in a lot of these things, those won't be on the Facebook Live platform. They'll be over on the YouTube platform. So the audio platforms won't have references, but the YouTube platform will. All right. So one of the things I think that's important to think about with respect to autoimmunity and autoimmune diseases is that autoimmune disease, and this will lead us into a bit of discussion around cause, potential causes, et cetera, has grown at literally an alarming rate since the end of World War II. Now, there may or may not be anything to do with World War II proper as far as being a war and that timing, but— Basically, if you think about the time period after the war ended in the late 1940s and early 1950s until now, and you look at the statistics for autoimmunity and the frequency of autoimmune disease, it's been an incredibly steep rise since then. So, you know, we're looking at roughly a 70-year period here. And so the first thing is that, and we're not gonna talk about all of these today, but there's about 80 autoimmune diseases. Wow. So that's a lot more than most people think exist. Now, we'll get into what autoimmunity is, but have 80 diseases in one category, it must be a pretty big deal. But then the next thing to think about is what is the prevalence of autoimmune disease? Well, the National Institutes of Health estimates it's around 23 to 24 million people just in the US. So if you're listening from another country, your numbers are gonna be different, but it's gonna be a big number. But NIH thinks we have about 23 to 24 million people in the U.S. with autoimmune disease. And if you contrast that to cancer, right now cancer is affecting 13 to 14 million people in the United States. So if you think about the magnitude of the number of people who have cancer, the second leading cause of death, and then you think about the magnitude of the number of people who have autoimmunity being another, you know, 10 million or so higher, autoimmunity is an extremely common medical problem in the United States and really all around the world. But I think it bears some notice that autoimmunity is something that used to be a very much more rare type of a disease, although autoimmunity has been described in modern medical literature as far back as we have it. And we have descriptions of what appear to be autoimmune conditions prior, but the frequency of it going on is just incredibly higher now. So if we look at since 1950 till 2022, when we're talking, it's almost a straight line, you know, like a logarithmic line going up in increase. Now, there are some other things about autoimmunity and the statistics and all that that we'll kind of get into here, but I wanted to start out with, well, okay, so autoimmunity, basically what is it? And then what are like the top Let's say 15 or so diseases that are included in autoimmunity. So the first thing is, is that autoimmunity is just what it says, where your immune system through one of many, many means, and your immune system has almost unlimited number of ways to act, which is good. We want our immune system to protect us from infections and help us heal and all that. That's great. It has a lot of ways in. When you become autoimmune, what happens is one or a group of of these means to triggering immunity get targeted against you instead of a bad guy, a foreign invader. Now that sounds like an oversimplification, but really that's the crux of what autoimmunity is. Now we can look deeply into the biology of the different autoimmune diseases, and what we find is different ones have different types of immune biology that create the disease. Hence, for example, rheumatoid arthritis having different disease in different disease processes than multiple sclerosis or Crohn's disease. So they're all gonna have different sort of, like I say, ways into the immune system being dysfunctional. And that leads us to different targets for the autoimmunity. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But the bottom line is, is that if you are dealing in the treatment side of things with something that is, say, a real targeted therapy, like the modern biologic drugs, then knowing the exact places where the immune system goes wrong wrong becomes very important because if I'm putting a targeted drug into a person and I'm targeting the wrong place, it's not gonna help that person's autoimmunity. On the other hand, if you are looking at it from a bigger picture point of view and trying to treat all of the underlying causes, then knowing the exact route through which the autoimmunity developed is helpful, but you're not really targeting just that route. You're targeting what triggered that route to become so aggressive or so well ingrained.
