why is it so hard for science to fight autoimmune diseases?
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Autoimmune disease happens when the body’s natural defense system can’t tell the difference between your own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to mistakenly attack normal cells. So it is the immune system working the way it should, but getting the target wrong.
As you can imagine, it is very difficult to stop the immune system from attacking the wrong cells without _also_ keeping it from attacking the right ones. Many of the treatments for autoimmune diseases involve basically wiping out the immune system and hoping that when it “reboots” it gets its targets right again.
Like many problems in biology, the systems turned out to be massively more complex than we initially thought. Similar to cancer, autoimmune diseases can have tons of different causes and triggers, both intrinsic and external. And because no disease ever presents the same way, finding solutions that fit any given instance is individually challenging.
the nature of the disease itself make it difficult ot fight, since its your own system attacking you, and most of the modern medicine we make use of regarding handling common dieseases relies on our immune response to be ” trained” into targetting what it should.
this is made near impossible when the target is the healthy cells in the body and the only “reliable” treatments so far involve supressing the immune system(which can lead to infection) or outright wiping out the immune system and get a viable replacement(bone marrow transplant)
Autoimmune diseases are the bodies own immune system mistakenly attacking itself.
What exactly causes the immune system to react improperly isn’t known and is actively being researched.
Since we don’t know the cause, and don’t have a complete understanding of how the immune system works (we understand a lot about it, but not everything) our only effective treatment is to suppress the immune system with drugs or blow it away completely with something like radiation therapy and rebuild it with someone elses in the hope it fixes the problem. Not exactly ideal either way.
If we can figure out the mechanism, then maybe we can figure out how to cure an autoimmune disease.
The same research may also be the key to curing allergies, as the mechanism that causes your body to attack itself may also be why it chooses to attack things like food and pollen.
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