If you have a neurological autoimmune disease, your immune system may be overly active and mistakenly attack healthy cells. The most common of these is multiple sclerosis (MS).
Abnormal immune responses against self can result in more than 80 autoimmune diseases (2) including about 30 autoimmune disorders of the nervous system.
Autoimmune diseases are divided into two classes: organ-specific and systemic.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune inflammatory illness that affects the central nervous system (CNS) when the body's immune system attacks its tissue. It is characterized by demyelination and varying degrees of axonal loss.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is actually an autoimmune disease. Autoimmunity occurs when immune homeostasis is broken by several main mechanisms shown in this figure, which directly result in an increase in error recognition and self-attack and a decrease in self-tolerance to autoantigens.
Among the most common are epilepsy, Alzheimer's, and stroke.
Neurological disorders are central and peripheral nervous system diseases, that is, they occur in the brain, spine, and multiple nerves that connect both.
Although numerous studies have shown that fibromyalgia is not an autoimmune disease (conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, whereby the body attacks healthy tissues), reliable research concurs that this condition does weaken your immune system by causing various abnormalities and irregularities.
Autoimmune diseases can affect many types of tissues and nearly any organ in your body. They may cause a variety of symptoms including pain, tiredness (fatigue), rashes, nausea, headaches, dizziness and more. Specific symptoms depend on the exact disease.
An anxiety disorder can be caused by multiple factors, such as genetics, environmental stressors and medical conditions. New research also indicates that chronic anxiety symptoms that will not go away can be due to an autoimmune response, triggered by common infections.
These include fibromyalgia and vitamin B12 deficiency, muscular dystrophy (MD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), migraine, hypo-thyroidism, hypertension, Beçhets, Arnold-Chiari deformity, and mitochondrial disorders, although your neurologist can usually rule them out quite easily.
Autoimmune demyelinating disorders such as ADEM and NMO may be particularly challenging to distinguish from MS, hampering a prompt and accurate diagnosis [10]. MRI is currently the most valuable tool in diagnosis and differential diagnosis of ADD.
Based on these findings, Alzheimer's can be characterized as an autoimmune disease with interdependent immune-protein interactions that exacerbate disease pathogenesis. This leads to a whole new way of thinking about the disease and opens up new avenues for study and treatment. Dr.
Tremor can be a sign of a neuropathy, a disorder of the peripheral nerves, or the nerves that bring messages from the brain and spinal cord to rest of the body. In particular, neuropathies caused by autoimmune syndromes such as chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) can have tremor as a component.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune and inflammatory disease, which means your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake.
Since the body's own immune system does the damage, GBS is called an autoimmune disease (“auto” meaning “self”). Normally the immune system uses antibodies (molecules produced in an immune response) and special white blood cells to protect us by attacking infecting microorganisms (bacteria and viruses).
Neuromyelitis optica is an autoimmune disorder that affects the nerves of the eyes and the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord. Autoimmune disorders occur when the immune system malfunctions and attacks the body's own tissues and organs.
The exact cause of autoimmune disorders is unknown. One theory is that some microorganisms (such as bacteria or viruses) or drugs may trigger changes that confuse the immune system. This may happen more often in people who have genes that make them more prone to autoimmune disorders.
Autoimmune disease affects 23.5 million Americans, and nearly 80 percent of those are women. If you're one of the millions of women affected by this group of diseases, which includes lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disease, you may be wondering why your immune system is attacking itself.
Who is at risk for autoimmune diseases? Millions of Americans of all ages have autoimmune diseases. Women develop many types of autoimmune diseases much more often than men. And if you have one autoimmune disease, you are more likely to get another.