How Lupus Affects the Body
Dr. Travis Stork: A lot of people don’t know exactly what lupus is so I’m going to
explain it. It is an autoimmune disease. Let’s take a look at this
animation. In an autoimmune disease your body’s immune system
produces autoantibodies that attack normal healthy tissues and that
is what causes cell injury. It causes inflammation and it can happen
anywhere in the body. You see there in the animation, that area
was called a malar rash. It can also affect your brain. It can affect
your kidneys. It can affect your skin elsewhere. It can affect almost
any organ because your body literally is attacking itself and we’ve
talk about other autoimmune diseases on this show, rheumatoid
arthritis, the list goes on and on. But lupus can particularly be very
serious. There are different types. There’s one called discoid which
is primarily limited to the skin. But the most common is systemic
lupus erythematosus. The key word there being systemic because it
can cause fatigue, fevers, hair loss, pain, nausea and sometimes
that one of the symptoms is this “butterfly” rash.
Dr. Drew Ordon: Yeah, it kind of goes over the nose and spreads over the cheeks
like that in the shape of a butterfly.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services