Summary-line: 22-Jan n, wilcox@cis.ohio-state. #More on Autoimmune disease Return-Path: Date: Tue, 22 Jan 91 08:33:43 pst From: cnorman (Cynthia Norman) To: cnorman, wilcox@cis.ohio-state.edu, luna@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu, anasaz!john@asuvax.eas.asu.edu, dwyer@nosc.mil, jgautier@ads.com, b-davis@cai.utah.edu, richter@triton.unm.edu, hxkpy@slacvm.slac.stanford.edu, botteron@bu-it.bu.edu, rollo@xylogics.com, proud@ihlpy.att.com, bill@picard.att.com, jsparkes@bnr.ca, island!green@uunet.uu.net, ann@snow-white.merit-tech.com, iex!neptune.iex.com!bert@uunet.uu.net, siang@biochem.umass.edu, smalley@pilot.njin.net, king@reasoning.com, mnetor!perle!kevin@cs.toronto.edu, afc@shibaya.lonestar.org, mark.ochsankehl@p2.f175.n120.z1.fidonet.org, abc@brl.mil, pjz@ceres.physics.uiowa.edu, ardyk@tc.fluke.com, cyn@mdaali.cancer.utexas.edu, ogicse!sequent!roseal@ucsd.edu, paulxxxx@portia.stanford.edu, andrea@sdd.hp.com, mvac23!thomas@udel.edu, ames!claris!netcom!shelamer@ucsd.edu, nick@icad.com, marks@ocfmail.ocf.llnl.gov, schillin@scl.cwru.edu, 880039a@acadiau.ca, lbrueck@wpi.wpi.edu Subject: More on Autoimmune disease Reply-To: cnorman@ucsd.edu *** EOOH *** Return-Path: Date: Tue, 22 Jan 91 08:33:43 pst From: cnorman (Cynthia Norman) To: cnorman, wilcox@cis.ohio-state.edu, luna@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu, anasaz!john@asuvax.eas.asu.edu, dwyer@nosc.mil, jgautier@ads.com, b-davis@cai.utah.edu, richter@triton.unm.edu, hxkpy@slacvm.slac.stanford.edu, botteron@bu-it.bu.edu, rollo@xylogics.com, proud@ihlpy.att.com, bill@picard.att.com, jsparkes@bnr.ca, island!green@uunet.uu.net, ann@snow-white.merit-tech.com, iex!neptune.iex.com!bert@uunet.uu.net, siang@biochem.umass.edu, smalley@pilot.njin.net, king@reasoning.com, mnetor!perle!kevin@cs.toronto.edu, afc@shibaya.lonestar.org, mark.ochsankehl@p2.f175.n120.z1.fidonet.org, abc@brl.mil, pjz@ceres.physics.uiowa.edu, ardyk@tc.fluke.com, cyn@mdaali.cancer.utexas.edu, ogicse!sequent!roseal@ucsd.edu, paulxxxx@portia.stanford.edu, andrea@sdd.hp.com, mvac23!thomas@udel.edu, ames!claris!netcom!shelamer@ucsd.edu, nick@icad.com, marks@ocfmail.ocf.llnl.gov, schillin@scl.cwru.edu, 880039a@acadiau.ca, lbrueck@wpi.wpi.edu Subject: More on Autoimmune disease Reply-To: cnorman@ucsd.edu Return-Path: Date: Mon, 21 Jan 91 22:28:54 -0500 From: Patricia P Wilcox Subject: More on Autoimmune disease Dear friends, My mother called me from Florida tonight to tell me that she's decided I'm not crazy after all. To put this in perspective, this announcement is nearly as earth-shattering as if it had come from the thought police on sci.med. 8-) Two things just happened. I've been telling her for months that printing inks were very toxic to many people in our family. She's been ignoring me, as usual. Today she watched my father suffer >from terrible attacks of uncontrollable coughing -- and this happened every time, and only, when he opened a newly-purchased book of crossword puzzles. Now she believes me. Second thing (and I wish I had been wrong about this) -- in the course of digging into medical literature on autoimmune diseases, toxic chemicals, drug hypersensitivity reactions, etc., I've been thinking a lot about my father. He suffered a devastating autoimmune blood disease a year or two ago, following heavy exposure to an insecticide. The doctor treated him with corticosteroids even though my father has reacted very badly to steroids in the past. And maybe he would have died without the steroids -- nobody knows. But following the steroid treatment it has looked as if he's cannibalizing his own muscle tissue, and these days he looks like a skeleton, almost. Anyhow, I began comparing all of the "autoimmune" (or chemical hyper- sensitivity) symptoms experienced by various family members with the symptoms of other known diseases. And came up with diabetes. And urged my father to have a glucose tolerance test right away. Sure enough, he now has diabetes. So, do you think it was the insecticide or the steroids that triggered the diabetes? I'm betting they both did. (By the way, this is not the first clue that steroids are *very bad news* for people who are susceptible to autoimmune reactions. There's a note in _Introduction to Clinical Allergy_, by Ben Feingold, MD, that when patients with lupus are treated with steroids, they have a tendency to develop an immune reaction to DNA.) Further notes: an old friend who just moved East after being a nurse in California for years says that (in California, at least) there has been a large upswing recently in the number of new cases of multiple sclerosis. How about a small survey of mailing list members with immune disorders? Send e-mail (to me, not the whole group) and I'll summarize, if there's anything to summarize: How many of you get headaches (burning eyes, coughing) from printed documents lately? How many of you were regularly exposed to dry-erase whiteboard markers, or violin rosin, or spray lacquer, or Tuff-Skin tape adherent around the time you first started experiencing difficulties (or some other environmental chemical -- please specify)? Do any of you happen to know your HLA A and B tissue types? (Unless you've had an organ transplant or volunteered as a bone marrow donor, you probably won't have this information. And I'm guessing that anybody who got my bone marrow would inherit my autoimmune problems right along with it.) This is all starting to look really scary, folks. --Pat Wilcox (wilcox@cis.ohio-state.edu)