Is There an Effective Lupus Treatment?

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If you’ve been diagnosed with lupus, or even if you’re just worried you might be suffering from it, you probably have a lot of questions about the condition. Lupus is a frightening condition to live with, and the damage it can do is very real. But as always, a little bit of information about the condition can go a long way.

So let’s talk about what exactly lupus is, how it affects your body, and most importantly whether there is any effective lupus treatment out there.

What Is Lupus?

There’s a good chance that you’ve heard the name lupus, if only on TV medical dramas, but never really got a good explanation for what it is. But basically, lupus is a condition that occurs when your body’s immune system begins to malfunction.

In a healthy immune system white blood cells identify and destroy foreign cells like bacteria and viruses. And after they learn to identify a particular type of cell, they attack it as soon as it enters the body, which is why people are able to develop immunity to certain diseases after being exposed to them.

But in lupus, your body begins to treat your own cells as foreign invaders and is conditioned to attack them. So essentially, your body begins to attack itself. The immune system begins eating away at everything from your skin to your kidneys. This is referred to as an autoimmune condition and lupus is just one of a number of autoimmune conditions.

How Does Lupus Affect You?

After you develop lupus, the antibodies in your blood start destroying important tissue all over your body. Often the skin is affected and, because it is the most visible, is the most obvious outward sign of lupus. People with lupus often develop distinctive rashes across the face that can range from a simple redness of the skin to really disfiguring damage.

But lupus also does damage all over the body. The cell damage from lupus results in aching limbs and joints. And lupus can actually do severe damage to the heart and veins which makes people with lupus more susceptible to heart disease like strokes or heart attacks.

In addition, lupus can damage other important organs like the lungs or kidneys. And in fact, one of the most significant risks of lupus is kidney disease. Lupus can eventually cause your kidneys to shut down which means your body has no way to filter toxins out of your blood and can eventually lead to death.

Fortunately, there is a way to treat lupus.

Is There An Effective Lupus Treatment?

No one knows what causes autoimmune conditions like lupus and there currently is no cure for lupus itself. That means that lupus treatment is effectively limited to finding a way to manage your symptoms before they become serious enough to be life-threatening.

Because the most significant damage from lupus occurs as a result of the immune system causing your tissue to become inflamed, most forms of lupus treatment are based on anti-inflammatory drugs. This class of drugs includes non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and corticosteroids.

Both drugs work in a similar way, reducing the swelling in the tissue affected by lupus. This limits how much damage lupus can do to your vital organs and is sufficient in most cases of lupus. But for the most serious cases, there is another form of lupus treatment that is actually quite effective.

Immuno-suppressant drugs work by, as you probably guessed, suppressing the immune system. Obviously, this is valuable for treating an autoimmune condition like lupus. By limiting the activity of the immune system, these drugs prevent lupus from doing damage to your body and from destroying your heart and kidneys, which can lead to death in severe cases.

Thanks to treatments like these, lupus is a very manageable condition. While severe cases can still result in death through heart or kidney failure, the vast majority of patients with lupus are able to live a normal life. In fact, 80-90% of people with lupus won’t see their lifespan reduced significantly by the condition. So it turns out that lupus is a condition with a number of effective treatments. And even though just a few short years ago a lupus diagnosis would mean a significantly reduced life for most people, this is no longer true.

So if you’ve been diagnosed with lupus, stay on top of managing the condition and odds are pretty good that you’ll be able to live a normal life. So tell us, have you ever been diagnosed with lupus? What lupus treatment works best for you? Tell us in the comments.