Medical Questions » Autoimmune Diseases Questions » Question No. 104
| Question: | Would you please explain what an autoimmune disease is? I have been told this is the cause of my arthritis |
| Answer: | Autoimmune diseases can be explained as the body rejecting part of its normal tissue, that for an unexplained reason, it suddenly considers to be foreign tissue.
If you have a kidney transplant, and receive someone else' s kidney, your body tries to reject this foreign organ, and you must be given medications to prevent the rejection. The same thing happens in autoimmune diseases, except that the body is triggered (for unknown reasons) to reject part of itself that has always been present.
Examples of autoimmune diseases include the nephrotic syndrome, polymyalgia rheumatica, pemphigus, pyoderma gangrenosum, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, Sjogren syndrome, systemic lupus erythematosus and temporal arteritis. |
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