What type of person gets autoimmune disease? Who gets it? I mean is it just something that strikes you like a bolt of lightning out of the blue? Not really. I mean everything has a reason. As you know, there’s causes for every single thing that occur in your life and including autoimmunity. There are probably four but maybe even a dozen categories that we could talk about.
If you look at it, it’s common, for example, to be genetic link. Genetics are not that uncommon when you have a look at the pattern of conditions, for example, like multiple sclerosis. Scientists are not sure whether it’s one gene or a combination of genes plus environmental factors that trigger the response of autoimmunity. I’ve got different theories on it as well here when we talk about the causes, because I’ve got my own ideas on causes based on my experiences, which are probably different from other people.
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Exposure is another thing. Many people I’ve seen over the years with autoimmunity, who develop autoimmune disease, were exposed to chemicals. Now, these could be solvents, they could be herbicides, weedicides, they could be sprays. I’ve seen people in printing presses a long time ago, when they had printing machines, develop autoimmunity. People playing on the golf course with lots of chemicals that were sprayed a lot around the green. I’ve seen some people like that develop, for example, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
People here in New Zealand did aerial topdressing, so they’ll have super phosphate fertilizers in aircraft and they’ll drop that fertilizer onto fields, pastures for cows. I’ve seen those guys develop autoimmune disease.
There’s no doubt, some people who are exposed to certain types of chemicals are certainly more prone to autoimmunity and also bacterial and viral infections. Other people who get those can get shunted straight into autoimmunity.
Women of childbearing years seem to be commonly hit, as I mentioned in the previous video, age between 15 to about 45. There’s much higher incidence of women contracting autoimmune disease at that time of their life, which shows you there’s likely a hormonal component there as well. Of course, ethnic groups, white people are more prone to type one diabetes.
African-Americans, for example, are more prone to lupus, for example. Again, it makes me think, is it the bacteria involved in here favoring certain types of communities based on their diets? Yeah, we’ll talk about that in causes.
There’s lots of different types of people who can get autoimmune disease, but there are clearly defined patterns that lead down that path to develop, what we call, pathophysiology, develop that disease. There are pathways that move down there, so yeah.
