World Lupus Day: "Between 2.000 and 3.000 Aragonese suffer from this autoimmune disease"

This chronic and uncurable condition is characterized by periods of calm and outbreaks of greater aggressiveness, controllable with specific medication.
What is lupus and what are its symptoms?

Many people still think of the word 'lupus' as that unknown disease that was diagnosed so many times in the television series 'Doctor House'. But the reality is that this inflammatory condition It affects 210 out of every 100.000 people in Spain and between 2.000 and 3.000 citizens in Aragon. 

La symptomatology is varied -from joint pain or swelling, fever with no known cause, muscle pain, skin rashes, or hair loss, among others-, but the profile is primarily female. According to the internist at the Systemic Autoimmune Diseases Unit of the Miguel Servet Hospital of Zaragoza, Luis Sáez Comet, "lupus mostly affects women between 15 and 45 years old.  

"It is a chronic autoimmune disease of unknown cause that causes the immune system attacks itself by mistakenly identifying one's own cells as foreign particles. Each person can be affected in a certain way since it is a very heterogeneous ailment. For some patients it can affect the skin, for others the kidney, the blood, the pleura... That is why The treatment depends on the symptoms presented by each affected person."explains the specialist.

Lupus Treatments and Medical Advances

The treatment of Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is based on different pillars. "It can be said that there are several groups. There are the so-called immunomodulators, which are prescribed to all patients unless they have some type of allergy; corticosteroids, which are very good for controlling possible outbreaks but which in the long term in high doses have effects secondary; immunosuppressants, which are drugs that reduce the activity of the immune system so that it does not attack oneself; biological treatments", explain Luis Sáez Comet.

The most characteristic of lupus is that it evolves into outbreaks that alternate with phases of remission. There are patients who have it under control with the drugs and others who, depending on how this outbreak affects them, may see their daily lives affected. But it is true that with the passage of time and greater knowledge of the disease, the most serious cases are seen less," points out the specialist.

An early diagnosis, "that we have more weapons to treat it" and the recent discovery of a genetic mutation in a patient with lupus, published in the magazine 'Nature', "help to future treatments to improve quality of life of those affected," says Luis Sáez Comet, who insists on the need to "have a reference doctor and to attend periodic check-ups for a better evolution" of a disease that this Tuesday, May 10, commemorates World Lupus Day.