If you have one autoimmune disease (or immune mediated disease) is it more or less likely that you will have another one?

J

Jaybee00

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
IIRC @Jonathan Edwards said somewhere on here that it is less likely to have a second AI disease diagnosis if you have one already.

I have a friend who claims (and her doctors tell her) that she has MS, Sjogrens, Crohns, and another AI disease she doesn’t recall the name of. In this really possible?

Also there are patients with both Sjogrens and ME/CFS diagnoses.
 
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Jaybee00 said:
IIRC @Jonathan Edwards said somewhere on here that it is less likely to have a second AI disease diagnosis if you have one already.
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I don't think I would have ever said that. Certain autoimmune diseases are significantly associated with other autoimmmune diseases. Rheumatoid is associated with Hashimoto's. Things get complicated with lupus because lupus is in a sense a super-autoimmune disease with a tendency to multiple autoantibodies. So it is a semantic issue whether you say lupus is associated with immune thrombocytopenia and RA or whether these can be 'nested' mechanisms within the umbrella lupus defect.

In practice most people just have one autoimmune disease but it is relatively common to have two of a cluster. I think there is actually a negative association between MS and RA, which would not be surprising since the immunogenetics are distinct.

Crohn's is not a typical autoimmune disease. It seems to be primarily an autoinflammatory disease like psoriasis. But I think it shares the immunogenetic risk factor of the A1 B8 Dr3 haplotype with some autoimmune diseases and it is associated weakly with some autoantibodies like anti-perinuclear factor and an antibody cross reacting with Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Some doctors tell people they have a whole bunch of autoimmune diseases on a regular basis but there are probably a very small number of people with 3 autoimmune problems outside lupus (where it is the norm). My impression is that the doctors who diagnose bunches of autoimmune diseases on a regular basis will often throw Sjögren's in for good measure!
 
Jaybee00 said:
that it is less likely to have a second AI disease diagnosis if you have one already.
Click to expand...
Less likely than what, though?

That a given person is more or less likely to have 2 or more AIs than just 1? Or that a person with 1 AI is more or less likely to develop a different, second, AI than another individual developing their first AI?

Or maybe it doesn't matter now as Jonathan never said this!

This is an interesting discussion, because annecdotally I have seen people list multiple AIs and I am aware of the connections Jonathan has listed above.
 
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I think this is the question you are asking, and this page provides an answer: "Yes. Having one autoimmune disease slightly increases your risk of developing one or more additional autoimmune condition." (compared to the general population).

Does having one autoimmune disease make you more likely to develop an additional one?

Read more about whether people with an autoimmune disease have a high risk of developing another one, including autoimmune thyroid disease
www.btf-thyroid.org www.btf-thyroid.org
 
To misquote Oscar WIlde:

To have one AI is a misfortune
To have two AI is slightly less unexpected than you might think, on a random basis (but not perhaps if you consider immunogenetic overlap)
To have three AIs is something a physician might come across once or twice in a career and might raise an eyebrow!

There are of course some very rare disorders where you can get several AI - like an AIR gene mutation - a defect in T cell tolerisation in the thymus. I never saw a case.
 
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