When Camille Marx was diagnosed with lupus four years ago, she had never heard of it. And she didn't have the faintest idea what an autoimmune disorder was.
Now that autoimmune disorders have hit the White House, though, the condition is being discussed everywhere from scientific laboratories to radio talk shows.
Lupus -- which First Dog Millie suffers from -- is an autoimmune disorder, as is Grave's disease, which has been diagnosed in both President and Barbara Bush. Both conditions are the result of the body's immune system mistaking a part of the body for a foreign invader and attacking it.
For Ms. Marx, the current public interest is one more step in helping her deal with lupus, a disease that affects 1 of every 2,000 Americans, causing such symptoms as skin rashes, joint pain and swelling, sensitivity to sunlight and anemia.
"I'm thrilled to have it in the public eye," said Ms. Marx, 47. "I found it very depressing to know that I was sort of destroying myself but I couldn't do anything about it. But the more I learned about the disease, the more control I felt I had."
Dr. Noel Rose also appreciates the newfound interest. Until a month ago, when he told people what his specialty was, they often responded with confusion or a yawn.
"I've worked all my life on autoimmune disease," said the chairman of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, "and no one cared about it. When I told them what I did, they thought I was talking about cars.
L "Now," Dr. Rose has found, "it's all people can talk about."
The current attention is welcomed by the medical community in general, who hope it will translate into additional funding for research, as well as helping doctors diagnose autoimmune diseases.
"The hardest part of diagnosing a thyroid disease [such as Grave's disease] is considering the possibility" of the immune system as the culprit, explained Dr. Paul Ladenson, director of endocrinology and metabolism at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
In Grave's disease, which affects 0.4 percent of the U.S. population, the thyroid gland becomes overactive, producing too much of the hormones that regulate body metabolism.
Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system responds its own cells as if they were foreign cells, producing antibodies to attack them. Normally, the immune system recognizes its own cells; an autoimmune disorder results when the system's recognition function fails.
