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Found this article on remedy.com and thought some of you might be interested in reading it.

Vicki

__Twenty-three and a half million. That’s how many Americans may be affected by one of the more than 80 diseases characterized as autoimmune. These disorders range from Hashimoto’s disease, the most common thyroid condition in America and a fairly controllable illness, to more complex progressive diseases, such as lupus, multiple sclerosis (MS) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Though each autoimmune disease appears to be distinct, scientists are finding out just how much they have in common.Genes, for example. “Many of the same genes constitute risk factors for multiple autoimmune diseases,” says Betty Diamond, M.D., chief of the Center for Autoimmune Diseases at North Shore Long Island Jewish Health Systems in

Manhassett, NY. Type 1 diabetes, for example, is associated with Hashimoto’s, ’s disease (in which the adrenal glands don’t produce enough cortisol) and celiac disease (in which the body loses its ability to digest gluten, a protein in wheat, rye and barley). “The same pathways might be involved in autoimmune activation, and targeting them may be therapeutic for several diseases,” says Dr. Diamond.Most autoimmune diseases damage organs by promoting an inflammatory process. Scientists have been working to develop treatments to fight that inflammation; a number of treatments developed in the past decade that do so have been shown to slow or even stop progression of these diseases. Many of them are “biologics”—disease-modifying medications that mimic the function of complex natural compounds.The coming years should bring additional improvements in treatment, as many more therapies are undergoing clinical testing.

“Years ago, the only approach we had was to suppress the whole immune system, and now we have drugs that target just a part of the inflammatory response,” says Noel Rose, M.D., director of the s Hopkins Autoimmune Disease Research Center in Baltimore. “We’d like to go further, to treat the specific immune response—to turn off the autoimmune process, or arrest it. That’s where the field is going.”Some researchers believe we are on the verge of a profound burst of knowledge that will unlock new ways to identify—and intervene in—very early changes in immune function, years before disease actually develops. The next step, says Balch, M.D., medical director of the Lupus Treatment Center in Atlanta, “is to develop a treatment that is not just specific for lupus or MS or RA but one that can attack the earliest phases in someone’s susceptibility to this autoimmune process.”Rheumatoid

Arthritis (RA) Ager, 43, a teacher at the United Nations International School in New York City, has been battling RA—an illness characterized by inflammation of the lining of the joints—for more than 25 years. Her low point came when, wheelchair-bound, she was told she’d never work again. “That’s when you find the seeds of opportunity in adversity,” she says. She tried a variety of therapies, with little success. Now Ager injects a disease-modifying drug twice a week. It’s keeping her healthy enough to work—and she now often puts in 10-hour days. “There’s still pain in my ankle joints, so it’s difficult to put on a pair of shoes,” she says. “My right shoulder is deformed, so putting on a jacket is hard. But I don’t let that worry me.”The RA PipelineRA treatment, once restricted to drugs that suppressed inflammation systemically, has come a long way.

“Compared to 10 years ago, we have dramatically effective, targeted biological treatments for RA,” says Kay, M.D., director of clinical trials in the rheumatology unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Now, there are several medications that target tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a key player in RA’s inflammation. In the past five years, newer biologics have arrived that are effective even in patients for whom anti-TNF therapy has been inadequate. Drugs that target other aspects of immune cells are in development.,_._,___

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