I’ve had several students with anxiety + migraines, autism + asthma, and food allergies + learning disabilities. Why is it that these conditions seem to go together, and what is it about having one that makes it more likely to have/develop others?
In: Biology
It depends!
Sometimes one system causing problems can have many different symptoms- for instance, immune disregulation can cause asthma, eczema, and food allergies. They *seem* pretty different, but there’s one underlying cause.
Similarly, having one autoimmune condition (defined by symptom set a) often increases the likelihood of a different autoimmune condition (any of many, defined by symptom sets b-z) in other contexts.
Sometimes, a problem in one system can directly damage another- like high blood pressure weakening blood vessels in the brain, and causing a stroke. This can be chronic as well- high sugar in poorly controlled diabetes slowly damages eyes, nerves, and kidneys.
There are many conditions that are correlated, but we don’t yet understand the underlying mechanism. We may have a better understanding for some of them soon! Just a note- with increased ability to analyze microbiomes, more correlations have been found between complex conditions (e.g. autism, anxiety/depression, etc.) and altered microbiomes. Almost all of these are observational studies, or conducted in non-human animals. I think that some people have gotten a zealous with their claims of microbiome abilities.
(You’re simply not gonna convince me that the reason depressed/anxious people have different microbiomes is because they’re less likely to eat salad. Not without MUCH better experimental evidence.)
Speculation #1: If a health issue causes cells to put out some bad factor (likely a protein), then one could assume that this bad factor can travel through the bloodstream and affect other organ systems. Why some systems are more likely to be affected than others could be due to chance or could be affected by how close they are or how much they interact with the affected system.
Speculation #2: If the issue is written into the genes (the instructions that tells your cells what to make), then cells of a certain system 1 that follow the wrong instruction may cause the issue. Not all cells of all systems can follow the wrong instruction, but there is a chance that another system 2 has an environment where cells can and will follow that same wrong instruction, causing an issue in another system.
Not an expert by any means (taken some science classes), but would be interested to see what others say
If your body can malfunction in one way, the. It’s probably faulty at a fundamental level. That means it will likely screw up somewhere else eventually.
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