Check your mate on this one.
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 11:13 pm
On Tues. my wife and I took our daughter to see a specialist in Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. She has been experiencing some joint pain and her AnA test came back elevated. On top of this she also has shingles. All this and she is only 9 years old. Lupus was also a possibility. After checking her out physically, he said she didn't seem to have enough symptoms to diagnose either RA of Lupus. She did have an enlarged liver and lymph nodes which he thought were from the shingles. He ordered more blood tests to maybe see why the AnA was positive. As i've mentioned before, my wife has RA and I MS. After quizzing us, he kind of chuckled to himself. He said he was always amazed to see how many couples were made up of two individuals with autoimmune diseases, maybe not the same one but an autoimmune disease no less. I stated that since he was seeing alot of kids with AI diseases wouldn't he expect that to be the case? He said yes but his statement also applied to couples without children. Apparently he has done alot of research on AI diseases and mentioned a study he saw that seemed to backup his statement. He said researchers used mice, some with AI disease and some without and equal number of males and females. They turned them loose together in some controlled environment and watched as a high percentage of the AI mice, he didn't mention any exact numbers seemed to want to pair up with other mice with AI disease. On a whole this behavior seems disadvantageous to our species as a whole because recessive genes would seemingly have a better chance to pair up. This seemed interesting to me.