For 10 years, Donna Jackson Nakazawa has suffered from a range of autoimmune diseases - ailments in which our cellular defense system mistakes friend for foe and attacks the body's tissues. Among the diseases caused by autoimmunity are: rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, Type 1 diabetes, thyroiditis and many others.
A journalist and author who has published several books, Nakazawa became fascinated with autoimmunity and spent the past three years exploring the topic. The result is her latest book, published this spring: The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World out of Balance and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope.
Here's the author on her book, her health and possible solutions to the problem:
How did you decide to write the book ?
Three years ago, I developed Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that paralyzed my arms and legs. For a long time, I couldn't move. It took me five months to learn to walk again. I decided that if I could ever get back the ability to type, I would write about what causes autoimmune diseases and what we can do about them. After I got better, as I talked to scientists in the field, I realized that the story was actually much bigger. These diseases have become a frightening epidemic. People at [the National Institutes of Health] were telling me this was scary, and no one was talking about it.
So, how big is the problem?
Twenty-four million Americans have an autoimmune disease. That's one in 12 Americans, and one in 9 women. Nine million Americans have cancer, and 22 million Americans have heart disease. So more than double the number of people who have cancer have an autoimmune disease. Scientists around the world have been looking at this, and over the past 10 years, 15 peer-reviewed journal articles have found that rates of autoimmune disease have been doubling and tripling around the world. You begin to see that not only do we have an epidemic, but it's growing.
Why does autoimmune disease remain relatively unknown as a medical phenomenon?
The idea that autoimmune diseases even existed was not widely accepted in medicine until the late 1970s. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the idea was taught in most med schools. So we are late out of the gate compared to our war on heart disease, our war on cancer.
