Nicknamed the “invisible disease”, lupus is an autoimmune disorder that disproportionately affects women and even more specifically, Black women. It occurs when the immune system begins a pattern of attacking the body’s organs when immune cells are inappropriately activated in the body. It’s difficult to diagnose, and when it is, it’s accompanied by major lifestyle changes to help keep the condition under control.
Antiphospholipid syndrome is an autoimmune disease that preferentially affects women. Patients with APS are typically given different medications to reduce their risk of blood clotting and help normalize lab values such as platelet count. Despite this, patients sometimes internally feel that they are not doing as well as the numbers are showing.
Juvenile dermatomyositis, a rare but often severe and chronic systemic autoimmune disease, includes a large number of patients who are treatment resistant, requiring long term immunosuppressive therapy. A small open-label study published in Arthritis and Rheumatology shows promise using a targeted biologic therapy called abatacept to treat such patients.
The same genetics that helped some of our ancestors fight the plague is still likely to be at work in our bodies today, potentially providing some of the population with extra protection against respiratory diseases such as COVID-19. However, there is a trade-off, where this same variation is also linked to increased autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.
In autoimmune encephalitis, a rare but serious and sometimes life-threatening inflammation of the central nervous system, the body’s own defences are directed against the central nervous system.
New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]) is the first study to show that childhood obesity is associated with an increased risk of four of the five recently proposed subtypes of adult-onset diabetes.
Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York have identified which parts of the immune system go awry and contribute to autoimmune diseases in individuals with Down syndrome.
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered the first molecular biomarker for acquired generalized lipodystrophy (AGL), a rare disorder in which fat deposits are destroyed, causing patients to have dangerously low body fat, signs of accelerated aging, and severe metabolic diseases including diabetes and fatty liver.
Two classes of drugs prescribed off-label for some patients with Type 1 diabetes can provide significant benefits but also come with health concerns, according to a study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers. The findings are published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
People afflicted with autoimmune diseases may someday receive help through treatments now under development by a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) licensee and its’ collaborations with two major pharmaceutical companies.
A $20 million gift from Andrea and Donald Goodman and Renee and Meyer Luskin will fund a new center at UCLA focused on the microbiome and its effect on health.
A recent study performed in Zambia by University of Maryland School of Medicine’s (UMSOM) Institute of Human Virology researchers found that high uptake of HIV preventative medicine, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), is possible in prison populations with adequate resources and support from the criminal justice health system.
A new grant of over $17 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has established La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) as the leading institute for human immunology data curation, analysis, and dissemination. With this funding, LJI has taken the helm of the Human Immunology Project Consortium Data Coordinating Center, a critical tool in the effort to fuel scientific collaboration in immunoprofiling and highlight findings from the overall Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC).
Melbourne researchers have improved our understanding of how the immune system is regulated to prevent disease, identifying a previously unknown role of ‘natural killer’ (NK) immune cells.
The January 2023 issue of SLAS Discovery contains a collection of four full-length articles and one technical brief covering cancer research, high-throughput screening (HTS) assay development and other drug discovery exploration.
A group of researchers from the Graduate School of Medicine at Nagoya University in Japan have discovered the impact of microRNA (miRNA) on inflammation in lupus in mice.
A new analysis by Cedars-Sinai investigators is furthering the scientific community’s understanding of COVID-19 immunity by showing that similar levels of COVID-19 antibodies are reached over an extended period of time in different population groups.
A new research paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 13 on December 17, 2022, entitled, “The role of pyrethroid derivatives in autophagy and apoptosis crosstalk signaling and potential risk for malignancies.”
UC San Diego study reveals critical insights into the complex biology of tissue-specific T cells, paving the way for a new branch of precision therapeutics in immunity, autoimmunity, and cancer.
In a video posted to Instagram, Grammy-award-winning singer Celine Dion announced that she has a rare condition called stiff person syndrome. Here, a neuromuscular specialist shares helpful facts about symptoms, diagnosis and treatment.
Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard, using Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source, have characterized the structure of integrins, a type of cell surface receptor involved in the immune response.
Dr. Kottil Rammohan, professor of clinical neurology at the Miller School of Medicine, addresses the autoimmune and neurological disorder that is affecting the Canadian singer and that impacts about one or two in a million people.
Autoimmune diseases are thought to be the result of mistaken identity. Immune cells on patrol, armed and ready to defend the body against invading pathogens, mistake normal human cells for infected cells and turn their weapons on their own healthy tissues.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that the cancer therapy known as CAR-T can be applied to multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disease of the nervous system. The findings extend the powerful tool of immunotherapy to autoimmune diseases, a class of diseases that are often debilitating and difficult to treat.
Children living with type 1 diabetes miss an average of nine more sessions of school a year compared to children without the condition, a new study led by Cardiff University has found.
After sun exposure, people with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) frequently develop skin rashes, which often are accompanied by a flare of their overall disease. This connection between ultraviolet (UV) light and disease flares in lupus is well known, but the way in which UV exposure actually triggers the disease has been poorly understood.
A study at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) highlights the success of a lupus peer support and education group that transitioned to a virtual format during the pandemic. In addition to receiving high marks from group members, participation more than doubled after the meetings went remote.
Every day, one person in Switzerland is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s own immune system attacks the myelin sheath of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.
New research presented this week at ACR Convergence 2022, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual scientific meeting, found that the recommended weight-based or non-weight-based dose of hydroxychloroquine led to more hospitalizations for flares among patients with systemic lupus erythematosus
New research presented this week at ACR Convergence 2022, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, found that the B-cell inhibitor belimumab significantly improved cutaneous lupus erythematosus (CLE) whether or not patients also had systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE or lupus).
New research presented this week at ACR Convergence 2022, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, found that the biologic B-cell inhibitor belimumab was associated with a lower risk of severe infections and hospitalizations compared to nonbiologic immunosuppressants.
New research presented this week at ACR Convergence 2022, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, demonstrated that withholding mycophenolate mofetil for 10 days significantly increased antibody response after 2 doses of COVID-19 vaccine, without a significant increase in flares.
New research presented this week at ACR Convergence 2022, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, found a greater number of preterm births in unvaccinated versus fully vaccinated pregnant patients with rheumatic disease and COVID-19.
New research presented this week at ACR Convergence 2022, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, found that 50% of people with low-grade proteinuria, which is protein in your urine, progress to clinical proteinuria within two years and show treatable lupus nephritis on biopsies.
• In a population-level study of 1,105 adults with stable glomerular disease (a type of autoimmune kidney disease), a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine was not associated with relapse risk; however, receiving a subsequent vaccine dose was associated with a 2-fold higher relative risk of relapse.
• Importantly, the increase in absolute risk associated with vaccination was low (1–5% depending on type of glomerular disease), and most vaccine-associated disease flares were mild.
Patients with cancer and a weakened immune system who are treated with immunotherapies tend to fare far worse from COVID-19 than those who haven't received such therapies in the three months before their COVID diagnosis, show findings in a new study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Researchers found worse outcomes in both the disease itself as well as the fierce immune response that sometimes accompanies it.
A comprehensive review and meta-analysis of published research confirm that young adults (40 years old and younger) have a slightly elevated risk for myocarditis or pericarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.