Why I Wrote The Autoimmune Epidemic

I have been paralyzed twice in the last seven years – once in 2001 and again in 2005 — unable to use my arms or legs, hug my son or daughter, or get up and down the stairs, or type a word to meet the impending deadline for this book.

My paralysis was caused by Guillain Barre Syndrome, an autoimmune disease in which the nerves’ myelin sheaths are destroyed by the body’s own immune system. Autoimmune diseases – a group of nearly one hundred conditions including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus — all share one common characteristic. In each case, the body’s immune system turns upon the body itself.

Normally the immune system’s army of white blood cells and antibodies help to protect us from harmful pathogens like bacteria, chemicals and viruses. But in patients with autoimmune disease, the immune system loses the ability to tell friend from foe. Rogue immune fighters begin to engage in harmful, even fatal, “friendly fire” — destroying the body’s own tissues and organs.

So there I was, paralyzed in 2001 and again in 2005, due to an autoimmune disease in which my body was attacking itself. I found myself in my mid-forties lying in the same hospital in which my father had died, in his mid-forties, from what would almost certainly, now, be diagnosed as autoimmune disorders.

Because I’m a journalist by trade, it was in some ways inevitable that my personal journey would turn into a professional quest. With the experience of autoimmune disease so profoundly affecting my own life, I wanted to know what was being done to investigate autoimmune disease. Why didn’t we as a society hear more about these illnesses? What factors in 21st Century life coalesced to cause autoimmune disease? Did environmental components play a role – and if so, what were they? And what could a patient do to stem the damage and prevent future crises?

I sought out answers from the top researchers in the field. I started interviewing scientists at NIH and Hopkins who confessed that they were gravely concerned that rates of these diseases have been steadily increasing in the last thirty to forty years. Scientists have been looking at rates of these diseases since the 1980s and have found that the number of patients afflicted with them has more than doubled in the past three decades. In fact, autoimmune diseases are reaching epidemic proportions. In the past decade, fifteen top medical journals have reported rising rates of lupus, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune thyroiditis, scleroderma, Crohn’s disease, Addison’s disease, and polymyositis in industrialized countries the world over. Over the past forty years rates of type 1 diabetes, a disease in which immune cells attack the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, have increased fivefold. In children four and under, the rate of type 1 diabetes is increasing 6 percent a year. Scientists agree these rising rates cannot be attributed to better diagnostics alone. Something in our environment is causing this change.

Today one in 12 people – and one in 9 women — has an autoimmune disease. That’s 24 million Americans. In fact, a woman today is eight times more likely to have an autoimmune disease than breast cancer.