Scleroderma

When an intruder invades your body – like a cold virus or bacteria on a thorn that pricks your skin – your immune system protects you. It tries to identify, kill, and eliminate the invaders that might hurt you. But sometimes problems with your immune system cause it to mistake your body’s own healthy cells as invaders and then repeatedly attack them. This is called an autoimmune disease.

The Immune System
Your immune system is the network of cells and tissues throughout your body that work together to defend you from invasion and infection. You can think of it as having two parts: the innate and the acquired immune systems.

The more primitive innate immune system activates white blood cells to destroy invaders. The innate system alerts the body to danger when it senses the presence of parts that are often found in many viruses or bacteria. The acquired immune system develops as a person grows. It “remembers” different invaders so that it can fight them better if they come back. When the immune system is working properly, foreign invaders (antigens) provoke the body to produce proteins called antibodies and specific types of white blood cells that help in defense. The antibodies attach to the invaders so that they can be recognized and destroyed.

Autoimmune diseases refer to problems with the acquired immune system’s reactions. In an autoimmune reaction, antibodies, or immune cells, attach to the body’s own healthy tissues by mistake, signaling the body to attack them.

Autoimmune Diseases
Autoimmune diseases can affect almost any part of the body, including the heart, brain, nerves, muscles, skin, eyes, joints, lungs, kidneys, glands, the digestive tract, and blood vessels.

The classic sign of an autoimmune disease is inflammation, which can cause redness, heat, pain, and swelling. How an autoimmune disease affects you depends on what part of the body is targeted. If the disease affects the joints, as in rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis, you might have joint pain, stiffness, and loss of function. If it affects the thyroid, as in Graves’ disease and thyroiditis, it might cause tiredness, weight gain, and muscle aches. If it attacks the skin, as it does in scleroderma/systemic sclerosis, vitiligo, and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), it can cause rashes, blisters, and color changes.

Many autoimmune diseases don’t restrict themselves to one part of the body. For example, SLE can affect the skin, joints, kidneys, heart, nerves, blood vessels, and more. Rarely, rheumatoid arthritis can affect your heart, blood vessels, and lungs, in addition to the joint problems it typically causes.

No one is sure what causes autoimmune diseases. In most cases, a combination of factors is probably at work. For example, you might have a genetic tendency to develop a disease.

These are some of the diseases that fall into the autoimmune category;
Ankylosing Spondylitis, Crohn’s disease, Dermatomyositis, Diabetes (type 1), Graves’ disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, Myocarditis, Multiple sclerosis, Polymyositis, Psoriasis, Psoriatic arthritis, Rheumatoid arthritis, Scleroderma/systemic sclerosis, Sjögren’s syndrome, Systemic lupus erythematosus, Thyroiditis, Ulcerative colitis, and Vitiligo

Treatment depends on the disease, but in most cases one important goal is to reduce inflammation. Sometimes doctors prescribe corticosteroids or immunosuppressive drugs. For additional information on the diseases listed above, visit the National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus , a component of the National Institutes of Health.

Progress and Promise
Further research should continue to enhance the understanding of the genetics and causes of autoimmune disorders and result in improvements in diagnosing and treating these diseases. For information on autoimmune disease research that is supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. NIAMS works with other NIH Institutes, Federal agencies, and private organizations in the Autoimmune Diseases Coordinating Committee, which coordinates research in autoimmune diseases.

Source: National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (2010), "Understanding Autoimmune Diseases"; the full article can be viewed here.