While you are sitting down doing nothing, or doing a whole lot of things to ensure you hit your goals, your immune system is doing pretty more. It is doing so much to keep you alive and protect you from disease and foreign bodies that could get you sick. Even when you feel you are not productive, your immune system is doing a lot to make sure you are standing and not lying down on the bed. Our immune systems are our body's soldiers and they do a good job until they start to take us down ourselves.
Our immune system can start to think that our immune systems are foreign and it is a process known as autoimmunity and the conditions they cause are known as autoimmune diseases. Currently, there are about 80 autoimmune conditions that doctors know and if I asked you to mention a few, you might be able to mention lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and multiple sclerosis but there are also a whole lot of rare ones that are worrisome and debilitating.
Autoimmune diseases are a leading cause of death and disability worldwide, and at some point in the life of about 3% to 10% of people worldwide, they suffer from an autoimmune disease. It is now interesting how when you check the gender of people suffering from an autoimmune disease, they are mainly women and it has been a mystery in medicine.
Researchers have been looking for a cause for why the immune system go rogue and why autoimmune diseases occur, and as you expect, they have been able to implicate environmental factors like diet as part of the causes, but then it is also believed that there must be a physiological part to why certain people develop it when exposed to the environmental factors.
There have been hypothesis that autoimmune diseases has to do with the sex hormones which is the hormone involved in reproduction and sexual differentiation. With this hypothesis, treating the autoimmune diseases could mean tweaking the hormone or its pathway but as you would expect with science, they do not agree with the hormones that could be responsible and so there is always a mixed result.
Another hypothesis have been the chromosomes of men being different from women. The culprit here is proteins produced by the X chromosome which is double in women and single in men giving women more reason to have autoimmune diseases than men. It has a so been said to be common in people with Klinefelter syndrome where they have 2 X chromosomes and 1 Y chromosome.
Another hypothesis look at the amount of inactive X in the tissue, and since women have more of the switched off chromosomes, it could be a reason why they are more prone to autoimmune diseases.
For now, we are yet to fully understand why autoimmune disease happens in the first place and why it is more common in women. Being able tk identify the cause can be a very good way to find solution to autoimmune disease occurrence.
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