Autoimmune diseases and Fibromyalgia
Autoimmune diseases and Fibromyalgia
First, it’s important to understand what an autoimmune disorder is. An auto immune disorder is when your body’s normal immune system has an imbalance and the body can start either attacking itself instead of pathogens or, decrease its ability to fight foreign invaders, causing vulnerability to fight off infections.
Unfortunately, the common cause for an autoimmune disorder is still unknown, at least for more than 80% of the cases, and it can vary depending on the type of autoimmune disorder and what part of the body that’s affected. With autoimmune diseases, the body’s immune system starts to create antibodies that instead of fighting infections, attacks the body’s own tissues. (1) All this, in response to an unknown trigger.
How are autoimmune disorders triggered?
Many autoimmune diseases appear from a combination of our own genetics and environmental factors that trigger them. Small changes in our genes will set us up for auto immunity by altering how our own cells work. They will no longer regulate well and start causing problems. The environment will interact with our genes which will predispose our own immune system to activate. Both in combination give us a predisposing condition for an autoimmune disease to be triggered. (2)
What are environmental triggers?
Environmental triggers can be many things that surround us. It depends where we grew up, what kind of foods we ate, who we lived with and what environments we have been exposed to. We sometimes do not take them into consideration, and they have been slowly affecting our body since the day we were born. Some of these environmental triggers could have made their way through our body by influencing our gut composition. Our gut is a common pathway to autoimmune diseases since these triggers can enter our body bypassing our natural walls and first lines of defense. (3) Many factors can affect our gut health, for example C-section birth, toxins in the environment, excessive hygiene, infections, celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, stress, sleep deprivation and disruption in our circadian rhythm cycle.
What are some examples of autoimmune diseases?
Many common diseases fit into the autoimmune disorder category, some of them are: Hashimoto’s disease and Graves’ disease, with your thyroid disorders, celiac disease (4), rheumatoid arthritis, (5) multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, (6) lupus, Sjogren syndrome, Type one diabetes (7) and many others.
How to avoid triggering an autoimmune disease?
Unfortunately, we do not have a simple test that could allow us to know if we are in risk of triggering an autoimmune disease. For that reason, it is always important to investigate our own family history. It lets us know what autoimmune diseases are prevalent. Since our genes are not the whole story, we should also investigate bad habits that are carried over from generation to generation, for example, bad dietary or sleeping habits. A lot of these are commonly shared but not studied and can affect our overall health and be the cause of autoimmune diseases. We do not need to shield ourselves in a bubble but rather understand what small changes we can apply to our daily lives that will greatly improve our immune system and therefore delay or prevent sickness.
How are they treated?
The way we treat autoimmune diseases in conventional medicine is by using three types of medications, no questions asked. The main treatments are corticosteroids, immunosuppressants and biologic response modifiers. It’s clear to say that these treatments are effective to a certain extent but leave many side effects which can cause very serious complications, including damage to the central nervous system, cardiac problems, allergic reactions, infections, and other type of problems. It fails to address what is causing the condition of our autoimmunity and it primarily relies on just medications. The side effects can sometimes produce more harm to the body over the long term.
What is the link between autoimmunity and Fibromyalgia?
Fibromyalgia is an illness characterized by chronic, widespread pain and tenderness, without a clear understanding of how a person gets it. (8) Many studies have shown it is not an autoimmune disorder, but there is evidence of an immune dysregulation. This means there is a problem on how our immune is working and they might be causing problems somewhere in our body. It makes it difficult to diagnose because its symptoms are similar or associated with other conditions, including some known autoimmune diseases. In many cases, fibromyalgia can occur simultaneously with an autoimmune disease. This may change in the future and perhaps it points to a different direction. For now, there is only evidence of an immune dysfunction that needs our attention.
What is the best approach?
A functional medicine approach would be ideal. Functional medicine has always had an approach on finding and treating the root cause of many conditions. This would be no different. Fibromyalgia is a condition that has no clear cause and many studies have shown that there is a combination of genetic factors, environmental triggers, hormone imbalances, emotional trauma, viral infections, or physical injuries, involved in its appearance. An approach that focuses on finding out what the root cause of any condition is will always prevail over just providing treatment to mask symptoms.
What would be the best treatment?
Treatment can vary depending what type of preventable risk factors we can address and what probable causes we are able to find. An important place to start would be evaluating our gut health. It is commonly overlooked by conventional medicine and it’s a common path for infections or food intolerances to make their way into our body and cause immune dysregulation. One treatment would be to try changing our eating habits and not fall into the standard American diet. For example, we could start by switching to a friendlier Paleo diet, which focuses on whole and nutritious foods and restricts processed foods and refined grains. That would be just an example of the many dietary changes we can try that can better suit our lifestyle. We can use an also use an auto immune dietary protocol to avoid inflammatory meals and take additional nutraceuticals and supplements as temporary treatment. It is important that these types of diets aim to heal your gut, they will have a higher micronutrient intake. This would not mean you would have to quit your current treatment, but it may sometimes produce better results or even lower the dosage. The focus is to optimize overall health.
Conclusion
Living with a condition like fibromyalgia or an autoimmune disorder, or maybe both, is not easy and many individuals have not received the correct treatment or support they need. It’s important to have a trained doctor that knows about these conditions. They will conduct a thorough intake of a person’s life history and will indicate what type of labs are needed. This will allow to map a person’s current health status, and this will allow to indicate what the right treatment should be. Many people are still suffering, not having a clue of what they have and were never given an opportunity to improve and live a healthier life. Make sure to take some time to think about what you would like and invest in making a change that will make a difference for you.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4518692/
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