Top 13 Auto-Immune Diseases Now (Autoimmunity Series - Part 2)

Let's just talk real quick about some of the top autoimmune diseases. So in this group of 14 or 15 we're going to talk about are the top ones. I'll describe each one. Most of them you've probably heard of already, and they don't really go in any particular number order. Just think of out of all 80 diseases plus, these 14 or 15 are going to be your top ones, and that's why you've heard of them. First one is type 1 diabetes, so not type 2 diabetes but type 1. And this is where you actually have an immune attack on the beta cells in your pancreas, and the beta cells release insulin. So if I'm attacking the beta cells in the pancreas, I'm not going to release insulin anymore. So in type 1 diabetes, you stop releasing insulin, and that can be very deadly, obviously. And so people with type 1 diabetes are generally given insulin as one of their primary therapies. Type 1 diabetes used to be known as juvenile onset diabetes because statistically more, you know, younger people develop type 1 diabetes than older people. Adult onset used to be known as type 2 diabetes, but now we know that you can develop the autoimmune picture of type 1 diabetes, you know, mostly in younger ages but also as you age as well. So Biggest thing with type 1 diabetes is you have a direct attack on the beta cells in your pancreas. Those are responsible for making insulin, and then you don't make much or any insulin anymore, so you need outside insulin to help you with that. Now, one thing that you're going to see is that hormone-producing areas like the pancreas and insulin, for example, and we'll see the thyroid and some other places, Are not an uncommon target for autoimmunity. And that's because those are also common targets for some of the fuels to autoimmunity. So we'll get to that in a bit. Next one I wanna talk about is rheumatoid arthritis. So a lot of people think of arthritis and they think of osteoarthritis, which is more the wear and tear type arthritis where maybe you've injured joints in the past and then they, you know, they swell up on, you know, on cold mornings or it's sort of hard to get going in the morning and all that. Rheumatoid arthritis, on the other hand, is actually an autoimmune attack on areas that are very critical to your joints working. One of the areas that's very critical, it's a very dynamic area to your joint working, is the synovial membrane, which is inside of each joint. Each joint that moves has a synovial membrane so that the bones don't come together. So if you look at rheumatoid arthritis, you actually have Attack inside of the synovial membranes that are supposed to be protecting and kind of feeding the joint. Okay, synovial membrane helps to produce some of the fluid that's in the joint. It helps to keep the flow of water in and out at a regulated level and does other immune things. So imagine if you've got that and then you start attacking that joint lining. with these immune attacks that then create inflammation, you're going to not only have inflammation but probably degeneration of the joints. So in rheumatoid arthritis, you often will see, not always, but you often will see paired bilateral joint problems. So it might, a person might complain of the wrists, both wrists first, or shoulders or elbows, and then it may move around. Later stage rheumatoid arthritis, you might actually see deformities. especially in the wrist and the hands, and it can be in other joints as well. So rheumatoid arthritis, something to keep in mind as not the wear and tear arthritis we normally see as we age called osteoarthritis. This is actually your immune system targeting the very part of your joint that's supposed to keep the joint moving smoothly. So that's rheumatoid arthritis. Now there are, in type 1 diabetes for example, we used to call it juvenile onset, That's because it mostly hits young people and is with them for the rest of their life. Well, with rheumatoid arthritis, there's sort of 2 categories. One is more of the common adult onset rheumatoid arthritis, and then the other is juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which we'll talk a little bit about later in the treatment section. The next one is a combination of 2 things, one of which we think of as a skin disorder, but it's actually an autoimmune disorder that can be more than a skin problem, and that's psoriasis and then psoriatic arthritis. So psoriasis, if you've seen it or if you have it, is a thickening and a scaling-like of the skin. And what normally happens is that you're supposed to— so your skin has these strata where the outside cells are produced. So if you go down to the base, At the basal lamina where you produce your skin cells, they work their way up, and then as they get thicker, they get keratinized, which is a type of material that fills up the skin cells so that we have a waterproof surface on our skin and we don't get bacteria and stuff in there. Well, what happens in psoriasis is that the area that creates the skin cells is essentially attacked biochemically in The autoimmune arena. And so instead of turning over, you know, a new batch of cells every about a month, you're turning them over much, much more quickly, just a few days. So if you can imagine, instead of pumping out enough cells to keep your normal thickness of skin, and you multiply that by a factor of, you know, 5 or 6 or 7, you're gonna have a lot of this, the keratinized cells on the top that just keeps stacking up. That's where the plaques come from, the psoriatic plaques. And you'll see them, you know, a lot of times on people's elbows. You'll see it along the hairline, along the sacrum on the back, and it can be pretty much anywhere, but those are real common areas you'll see it. Now, when you look at psoriasis, about 30% of the people who have psoriasis, because it is a true biochemical autoimmune problem, will develop psoriatic arthritis. And what that means is now I not only have psoriasis, but I have an inflammatory joint disease along with my psoriasis. So it's almost a third of people with psoriasis develop psoriatic arthritis. And again, psoriatic arthritis is similar to rheumatoid arthritis in its presentation. It's an inflammatory arthritis and it can create not only a lot of pain but a lot of joint dysfunction as well. So psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis are sort of a— they're 2 different diseases but they are related to one another. Generally you have to have one to have the other. Then we have a condition which is extremely common and getting more common called lupus. You've probably heard of And normally they call it SLE or systemic lupus erythematosus. And they originally, when they first started to describe lupus in the 1800s, which is about as far back as we have records of lupus being described, they thought it was a skin disease because it would come out with— and this is not in 100% of people— but it would come out with a classic sort of rash that would often be on the face. And came to be known as a malar rash or a butterfly kind of shaped rash. And a lot of times when doctors are trying to sort out rashes on the face, when they look like that, there are other types of dermatologic problems that can look like lupus. So a lot of times then, as we'll talk about later, you have to go and you have to do testing, sometimes things like biopsies, but a lot of them are blood tests that are done. To see if the immune system is hyperinflamed and in autoimmune direction. And that's more indicative of a classic lupus presentation. So there are a lot of people who have lupus who actually don't show up with the facial rash, but they'll have the internal manifestation. So a lot like, you know, psoriatic arthritis is an internal manifestation of psoriasis, an external disease, lupus The rash is just sort of a piece, a little piece of the picture of a very big disease that's affecting the inside of the person. Now, one of the concerns that you have with these major, you know, what we think of as the name brand autoimmune diseases, is that the longer that they go on without treatment, you can wind up with a great deal of inflammation inside and damage the internal organs. So treatment becomes very, very important. when it comes to what you're going to do about things. The next ones, I'm just going to go through these really kind of quickly because you kind of get the idea. So we talked about lupus, the inflammatory bowel diseases, which include Crohn's and colitis. We've talked a lot about them before. Addison's disease, which is an attack on your adrenal cortex, and so you have a low cortisol output, which can be potentially deadly. Graves' disease, which is immunologic attack on your thyroid where you go into a high thyroid state, hyperthyroidism. And then you have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which usually winds up as a low thyroid state. So you have Graves' and Hashimoto's as 2 thyroid attacks by the immune system. You can have Sjögren's syndrome, which attacks a lot of the glandular tissue in the head, ENT area. Myasthenia gravis, So MG, myasthenia gravis, is where you actually are having autoimmune attack against the neurological system that allows your muscles to contract and respond to stressors. Then there are something that just, you know, I'm gonna say the 3 decades I've been working with patients, I've seen get, you know, much more common autoimmune vasculitis family. And this is literally where the inside lining of your blood vessels become attacked, and there's different subcategories of this, but that can obviously be very dangerous. Pernicious anemia— this is where you wind up with an inability to absorb vitamin B12, and so you get a large cell anemia, and that can lead to a number of problems downstream because you need B12 and then folic acid, its cousin, to work together to help you with your DNA production, other very important things. So you wind up with a lot of neurological disease, a lot of other problems that go along with it. And then the last one, so we've talked about 15 or 16 here, is celiac disease. We've done whole programs on that. I've got some YouTube Shorts on it as well. You can go back and look at that. But bottom line is celiac is an autoimmune attack on the GI tract, and so you wind up with an intolerance to anything in the gluten family. So we think of wheat, but there's a number of other grains that are gluten-producing grains. So I wanna take and just take a brief pause right there to say, okay, this, that's our first section, which is, you know, what is autoimmunity? So it's an immune system attack on yourself, hence autoimmunity. And so your immune system has for some reason gotten misguided and decided some part of you needs to be attacked.