Large-scale study reveals autoimmune disorders now affect around one in ten
gla.ac.uk
gla.ac.uk
Edit: the consultant I saw said I probably wouldn't get diagnosed 20 years ago when she started. I had trouble convincing my doctor it could be this condition. I'd never have known about it unless I'd mentioned it to my mum who told me my sister (who I don't have contact with) has this quite severely and it took her 10 years to get a diagnosis and access to helpful drugs.
All issues are rising, the whole 'we are just smarter now' is hubris, we really are not.
Overall, all our tech looks at helping us not have to change, grow, or adapt. We want to live a life of comfort but comfort means no pressure and no pressure means no adaptation reinforcement of advantageous mutations, since what is most advantageous is being average in every way.
i wonder how this carries over to mental stuff. like autists or psychopaths might have gotten forced out of society a few hundred years ago so they couldn't reproduce as much, might explain why the former is so much more common? idk
The food we eat, the drugs we get, the lifestyles we have, the air we breath- are all different and make us different people than prehistoric humans.
For better and for worse.
I also expect to see hormonal birth control become less effective over many generations. Those for which birth control fails are likely to have more children.
Of course, all of us here will be long dead before any exploration pressure exerted by those drugs becomes apparent at a population level.
Most people _not_ dying of fentanyl overdoses are not taking them in the first place, rather than surviving exposures due to sturdier nervous systems. I think a normal interpretation of the phrase "opioid resistance" would mean that their systems can tolerate a higher dosage.
Conversely, most birth control failures are thought to be behavioral differences. I.e. whether the user is aware that protection may be absent due to missed doses or other scenarios called out in the instructions.
Maybe these two forces will cancel out since one selects for more discipline and the other for less...
Forgetting to take pills is already part of the measured effectiveness of hormonal birth control. It's included in the official statistics.
As it should be, obviously. Not taking pills is the easiest and most important way to resist their effects.
I rather hear from more and more people, how they have to struggle reproduce at all.
Absolutely not. As long as they're in use, the pressure is there to make them less effective.
Having <1% of population die before breeding because of some factor (no matter if drug overdoses or something else) is not a sufficiently big pressure to nudge towards an opioid resistance in just a few generations; if there today were some meaningful sub-population with such a resistance, an effect so tiny as the current overdose deaths might result in that resistance spreading over hundreds or thousands of generations; it would take a few more orders of magnitude more overdose deaths to have an effect in just a few generations. Similarly for hormonal birth control, especially if it fails, it has an above-average likelihood of being aborted.
I mean, all these things can happen, but not after we're dead, but at the time scale of year 3000+ by which time I'd expect that medical technology would allow us to control these genes directly, making the direction of natural selection irrelevant.
The number of people with a disease can stay static, but the number of diagnoses can increase dramatically with widespread screening and accurate tests.
With funding secure you can now roll out more research studies that tell practitioners all about the disease and how it’s “increasingly important”. Now doctors will test more patients for the disease, maybe over diagnose it too. And so and so forth.
Humans are flawed. Humans make research. We should be more skeptical about supposedly “established” science.
There seems more evidence that allergies are on the rise. Maybe. I note that I found a lot of articles saying things like "autoimmune conditions are a Western disease" and blaming modern lifestyle. But arthritis is as old as the hills.
I'm not at all denying that they are actually on the rise, but nothing really seems to tackle this in a way that answers all the questions - is it on the rise or do we just detect and categorise it now. Does it occur because people live longer? In the past did people have these conditions and not know, have to live with it or die? I know that for my back condition people in the past got it and their back bones fused together over time, nowadays people tend to get treated with anti-inflammatories and now biologicals plus exercise regimes to prevent it. As there is a wide range of intensity within each autoimmune disorder the majority of people who had a condition in the past might be unreported.
So if anyone can point to articles or papers that address all those things I'd be very interested.
Who funds this and that research?
You will find that pharnaceuticals in their desire to show growing market opportunities to their backers, and grow, will make very well sure to fund enough groups so that some of them come up with the conclusion: these issues are on the rise and don't appear to relate to environnemental exposures, even adding that treatments are or will be made available to diagnosed patients.
You will then find another paper, likely funded by an NGO working on reducing the use of pesticides, or other surely health impacting industrial habits, that there is undeniable correlation between the intensive use of chemicals in agro and the rise of auto-immune disease, with a lag of X years, whatever make the numbers look legit.
I'm not qualifying scientific research in general as biased towards the backers' incentives, but there is a lot of noise in statistical discoveries, scientists mostly interested in publishing something since that's their financial prerogatives to stay in the game.
With all that being said, I will give my "opinion" which may answer part of your questions, but my conclusion wasn't reached by the standard of scientific methods:
- we are ingesting and getting exposed to a wider range and higher quantities of toxic compounds, often so synthetic. - the immune system is a complex machine, that tilts and can overreact when on alerts, tends to have good memories, and can trigger or retrigger oversensitiveness, all for our survival's sake, it isn't de facto a disease to have the immune system take the wrong fights. - that immune system, shown to not always discriminate properly, probably having evolved to be rather safe than sorry. - we don't fully understand the immune system, maybe we barely do.
Is it possible that we diagnose as a disease what might simply be the expected consequences of long term exposures to undersirable chemicals? That pharma got to sell something so they don't have any problem marketing chemical therapies and strongly promoting that rather than suggesting addressing the causes might be a better option?
It wouldn't be the first time in history that physicians insist with the known treatments for symptoms they ignored the causes.
Again take this with a pinch of salt, i am not advising against drug treatments altogether but took the opportunity to remind this thread that health care is also a business.
From a non medical scientist who happen to have allergies and skimmed through a few hundred papers on the subject.
That is the marker of a bad question. The way to solve it is to move into more actionable questions.
I want to buy that car brand because it has so many recalls.
Every system has bugs, and recalls means you're fixing them. Which to me is much better than hiding them.
The government specifically works with industry to allow corporations to get away with saving a buck at the expense of the wider public, while the wider public is given a medications and bandaids downstream that decades later turn out to be scams: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Like when the government allows Coca Cola and Snapple bottling companies to switch to metric tons of non-biodegradeable plastic, while individuals are told they can’t have a plastic straw or bag, and can save the world by recycling plastic (a scam by the plastic industry to distract from the upstream problem, nearly all of the “recycling” consisted of shipping to China).
Or how factory farms are now causing more negative externalities, which we are now finding out last month:
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/use-of-antib...
https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/why-ar...
I invite you to consider the same dynamic with autoimmune diseases and others. It’s the same question of whether kids always had this level of gender dysphoria and ADHD and autism, or did something happen in the environment, or did the industry start to overdiagnose them?
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but activists on either side insist on their explanation being the dominant one, or perhaps the only one. Similarly to how other activists might insist on systemic sexism or racism to explain a gender pay gap, or systemic antisemitism to explain criticism of Israel, etc. (Disclaimer: I’m a Jewish straight cis male.)
This is an impulse by people with a specific agenda / issue to make sure their agenda “wins”. In every case, there are real problems that need to be solved upstream, but the focus by well-meaning activists is only on downstream solutions (eg prescribing amphetamines to ADHD-diagnosed kids) rather than upstream solutions (eg shortrr school days and allowing kids to climb trees like in Finland, where ADHD has far less diagnosed). They will spend decades advocating the same thing and expect a different result — it’s not collective insanity, it is actually learned helplessness.
It is common to think this way when one’s “tribe” is involved. To illustrate it, I will touch on an issue with dynamics that have affected many people on HN. I hope it’s alright to mention it, because that is the only way you’ll see that the “downstream focus” even concerns many sacred cows.
So — to hit home, this even happened on HN with depression. I have seen it for years, where any attempts to attribute some diagnosed depression to upstream causes like diet and exercise and environental factors are met with “you just don’t understand, clinical depression is completely different, and you should be quiet”.
In each of these issues, the science shows that the theory that promotes medical interventions downstream is often wrong, eg in 2022 we found this out when it comes to the theory of chemical imbalance / low serotonin explaining depression:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/20/scientists-q...
On the other hand there is a ton of studies on everyone from young girls to middle aged people getting far more sad and depressed:
Teen girls: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness...
20% of all middle-aged women is on antidepressants (surely it can’t all be explained by a chemical imbalance, right?) https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/cdc-states-1-in-5-women...
Opioid epidemic in men, once again much of it is due to capitalism, both from an employment and a pharma industry side: https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html
But it’s easy for society to just prescribe medications to people rather than fixing systemic issues, eg implementing a UBI or 20 hour workweek overtime protections so people can spend more time with their family. In capitalism we’d rather allow companies to social problems with surveillance capitalism, social networks and AI to optimize clicks, because that’s what the market demands.
On the other hand there are tons of studies and books on how the market and new technology has led to the breakdown of American social and family life. Starting with “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam back in the early aughts. People in big cities don’t even know their own neighbors. They live alone with their cats, order in netflix and uber eats, they stick their kids in public schools and parents in nursing homes, but hey, the economy is good right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-hea...
Anyway to end with autoimmune diseases… notice how much more effort it would take for our society to stop producing plastics in clothes, that break down into microplastics on every wash, aren’t caught in drains and now find themselves everywhere, humans accumulate more and more microplastics. Rather than confront these environmental issues head-on (as we did once with CFCs and Toronto Protocol, the one big win for solving collective action problems) we allow the microplastics to accumulate in all biological beings, including us, throw up our hands and wonder aloud what could be causing autoimmune diseases? Meanwhile it is more convenient to open a new plastic spoon from a plastic package shipped from china, than wash a metal one. Instead of refilling bottles like our ancestors, we buy new ones every day and chuck them in the “recycling” LOL. Oh, and polyester is just so stretchy and convenient, as is teflon non-stick coating on our pans, why demand our government tell the industry to phase out nonbiodegradeable stuff and research biodegradeable alternstives? Nah that’s too hard to do as a society. So the problems get worse every year and “activists” arise who attribute it to a systemic issue like sexism or racism — they think they’re a great ally but rather than fighting each other we should band together to demand our govenrnment aggressively tax negative externalities upstream with Pigouvian taxes.
Fiscal policy btw would be a great way to remove stimulus and UBI money from the economy. Certainly much nore targeted and better than crude monetary level the Fed has, raising interest rates on everyone. But our politicians are scared to raise taxes on industries, or go up against Big Ag or Big Pharma. So we as a society allow Day Zero to occur in cities, antibiotic resistant bacteria to grow, etc. all because of regulatory capture and cowardice. It will continue unless people recognize that the real problems are upstream, stop fighting each other and clearly spell out how we can organize to demand our government raise taxes on industries externalizing costs to others. If there was ever a proper role for government, it is that!
PS: with AI, experts say 10% chance that humanity is wiped out… yet we can’t stop the competition and progress, and certainly when people are affected we’ll have industries to help them out downstream. Just another example, perhaps may be the biggest and fastest one soon.
Peer review does not mean fraudulent studies can't go through, it is not even meant for that. Reasonable review does not excludes these.
I have no idea how accurate that is, but it’s what over heard.
I'm also quite certain my great-grandmother had this same thing, but no would have been able to diagnose her as anything but excessively thin back then. (It severely increases your metabolism and can cause osteoporosis.)
Disorders lacking an obvious cause seem to get lumped into the autoimmune category whenever the symptoms are related to inflammation. Before modern medicine, these disorders might have been masked by or passed as a milder form of tuberculosis or something else. It's still possible that there are pathogens involved that haven't been identified.
So “we’re living longer” is not the answer, it probably has much more to do with the massive amounts of new chemicals and pollutants we’ve exposed ourselves to. No barriers to transport along with unrestrained trade and frequent migration also mean were exposed to way more pathogens than we evolved to encounter, so some of them could also be blowback from legitimate immune responses.
> Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours.
You see this basically throughout history except in very bad times like famine or major plagues, or were there is persistent dietary issues as we introduced in the late 19thc, or early on in the switch to farming. Rural areas also tend to do better than urban.
Antiseptics, as well, were huge in saving people from from otherwise deadly nicks.
Measles is fairly low mortality in absolute terms. Even within living memory, getting the measles and the mumps was a normal childhood experience. The overall mortality is 1 or 2 per thousand and the disease is most dangerous in under 5s and over 20s. So before widespread vaccination, everyone was exposed before their 20s and we excluded under 5s from the count.
Edit: I realize 5 is the cutoff for this study because measles and the like. It is deadly to youth in pretty stark contrast to older.
“Deadly” can be true for measles in young children but again, it’s important to be clear that the actual mortality is very low. It certainly contributed (with many other diseases) to lowering life expectancy for infants, but it was not even close to a death sentence; the vast majority survived. As I said, it was basically a rite of passage even for our grandparent’s generation.
There's a reason humans survived to modern day.
well we made a bunch of kids to offset deaths.
I mean, sure, getting chicken pox was relatively common when I was a kid, and few people died of it. But a low percentage of all the population is still a large number of people.
I would say that infections from battle wounds are probably more likely, but that probably has more to do with the surface area and size of the wound and health leading up to the battle. A big scratch from a briar or a chicken might bleed a lot, but the wound will be closed fairly quickly. A big scratch from a sword is going to take a lot longer to close, and you might have been near-starving and short on sleep for weeks beforehand and have been crammed in tight conditions with 10k other guys.
That said, it's still greatly exaggerated to say a war-wound is guaranteed death. People got hurt in battle a lot and generally made it out OK. You can find lots of famous examples where even to me it's quite shocking they were able to survive at all without modern medical care. For example, not only was the hard-partying Alexander the Great wounded about a jillion times in battle, one of his last battles involved a punctured lung. It probably eventually contributed to his death sometime later, but it's surprising to me he even lasted the night!
Consider, 50 to 70 million deaths in WW2. And that isn't looking at more genocidal like methods earlier humanity almost certainly used. Numbers would be lower, but percentage higher.
Yes, we are resilient, but that has limits. And is mostly overcome by having more kids.
The data suggests your feelings are incorrect, and that things were not as dangerous as you feel they are. I'm not even sure what you mean in this case at all: people still washed their clothes, garden tools are not any more sterile now than they were then, and refrigeration can be worked around by different dietary and food storage choices. (Ironically the need for refrigeration partially came with societal advancement: fresh milk for example was traveling farther and farther and increasingly transactional circumstances, which meant it was more likely to carry food-borne diseases whereas, when you go further back, nobody was waiting days to drink their fresh milk and thus didn't worry about it.)
I’ve no doubt that there was a statistical impact, but it is probably rendered invisible by such things as skyrocketing obesity, heart disease, and cancer rates caused by the modern environment and lifestyle. This is probably especially true when you consider the QoL of many older people today. This is also apparent when the cited article mentions that many fewer people died of heart disease, but they did die of heart damage caused by infections. They lived just as long, you might think antibiotics would keep us going even longer, but we tread water because now we simply die of heart disease at about the same age or a little younger instead.
Most of the feels is from personal experience with almost losing kids and spouse to infections. In the modern world. :) They 90% would be dead in the past.
Similar experience with grand parents. Though, they did pass somewhat early.
I get what you're saying, but Measles is definitely the wrong thing to put here. Most people over the age of 35 aren't going to get what you're saying.
Mortality of women during child birth is massively lower. That is the most apparently obvious one. Whole classes of diseases from malnutrition are down or don't exists or are fixable (anemia, lack of iodine, that sort of thing). Tuberculosis was frequent enough to have sanatorium specializing in that. Lepra.
When you read history of epidemics, of food and generally of medicine you find a lot of premature deaths that just don't happen now.
Sure, absolutely. Just not in large enough numbers to drag the numbers down lower than today [after age 5], when we've dramatically increased the number of deaths due to preventable issues. For example, heart disease was much rarer, and cancer incidence was less than 10% of today's numbers. Fewer people died in car accidents, and fewer were shot by AR15s. The causes shifted around. We made medical progress, but we took steps back as well.
As I also mentioned, there've been peaks and troughs. As the paper I cited mentions, health became so bad after the mid-1800s peak, by the late 1800s and early 1900s, the British army had to lower its height requirements to absurd levels because of malnutrition - malnutrition that was a direct consequence of technological advancement!
I wish you luck and hope you find some physical relief as well!
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-linked-to-40-increase-i...
When I’m at a PC again I will link you to some studies showing cases where it exceeds the amount you’d expect in a natural infection and there’s documented cases where it continues weeks after injection unlike the virus which doesn’t last that long in healthy young people.
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behi...
"Young, healthy people" makes enormous assumptions about a tiny slice of the population. After one or more COVID infections, they may acquire the dreaded "co-morbidities" that a huge fraction if not a majority or supermajority of the population have. Despite how we like to think we have personal control over our circumstances, in this situation, we do not. It is a collective effort and we are failing to control transmission.
Vaccines are part of this, as are masking with N95 respirators, testing, air cleaning, paid sick leave, scientific isolation and quarantine periods, etc. I am hopeful that with targeted or universal air cleaning combined with partial population immunity (maintained via periodic vaccine updates) and paid leave, we can push the reproduction number below one. This is a very serious crisis that is worsening in some ways, but we are acting like the physical environment has no bearing on our lives if we think positively.
It's a lil crazy that people are so willing to say well we let it rip, and because of that, we can ignore any problematic findings because we can't compare current populations easily and across long periods of time. The most likely hypothesis, based on known mechanisms and studies, is that yes, COVID infection will fuck you up. This is the case with most human pathogenic viruses, even ones that have a "mild" initial presentation like EBV (multiple schlerosis), CMV (wears down immune system in old age), Chickenpox (shingles), HPV (cancer), or HIV (immune dysfunction).
The fun thing is, COVID sometimes has an acute life-threatening aspect as well, so it is probably double the fun.
No, I just mean that the study observed an increase in incidence of autoimmune disorders which cannot be explained by COVID because of the window of collection.
> Over the study period, age and sex standardised incidence rates of any autoimmune diseases increased (IRR 2017–19 vs 2000–02 1·04 [95% CI 1·00–1·09]).
I completely agree with COVID both being generally dangerous even outside of the acute infection and that it has likely caused a substantial increase in autoimmune disorders. This study just indicates that there are likely other environmental factors at play as well that predate COVID.
???
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090701082911.h...
(From March, 2020): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7146037/
(Increased diagnostic capability seems unlikely to be a factor in T1D's prevalence -- when it is triggered, untreated T1D leads to obvious and serious symptoms (eventually death through ketoacidosis) over the course of months. It's not something you can just ignore and power through; treatment is required to survive.)
I also am a bit troubled by how quick people are to dismiss such studies. I think people are operating off of a prior of "big shifts in health don't just happen," which in my opinion is a demonstrably false prior. I think the default prior should be "We're in completely new health waters, testing in production, anything is possible and problems are known and not explained."
In particular nobody can explain why eyesight is getting drastically worse. Obesity in the developed world is a big unknown (I think even lab rats weigh more). I believe there's consistent evidence of allergies increasing. And the balance of evidence is that sperm counts are going down, but for whatever reason I think people assume that's a conspiracy theory or just are afraid to believe it.
[1] https://www.academia.edu/download/40579191/ijcd-3-4-8.pdf
nobody can explain why eyesight is getting drastically worse
The prevailing theory has to do with lack of exercise of the eyeball, i.e. children spend too much time indoors locked at a single viewing depth; children who spend more time in the outdoors tend to have better eyesight. In China they're running broad studies which seem to indicate that children's eyesight stops deteriorating when exposed to more bright daylight: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05156190
Obesity in the developed world is a big unknown
Sugary/unbalanced foods and sedentary lifestyles? The proofs we have go as far to document the entire systemic changes that ultimately lead to insulin resistance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6471380/
sperm counts are going down
There's suspected links to endocrine-disruptive pesticides, but FAFAIK no proven mechanisms.
Interestingly it has been found that only periphery matters for this process, that's how those fancy glasses like Hoya Miyosmart work, by intentionally defocusing the periphery.
The rise of autoimmune diseases and acute lymphoblastic leukemia in young people in the developed world was linked to the hygiene hypothesis.
I’d love a study done on autoimmune disease prominence in expats vs local populations.
I read about this about 10 years ago in the NYTimes and haven't seen it in print since. But the last 3 doctors I've seen (in different cities), I've asked them about this and the responses have ranged from "research is showing this is likely the case" and then another one responded with a flat out "yes, that's correct." Yet I don't see anyone actually talking about this.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090701082911.h...
I know someone who learned through an elimination diet that they are sensitive to gluten. Maybe they actually have celiac disease, but they currently have no reason to investigate further -- the only practical "treatment" is avoiding gluten, which they are already now doing.
Furthermore, apparently the blood test for celiac disease requires the patient be exposed to gluten for some time before the blood is drawn. So they'd have to start eating gluten again (and thus suffering) to learn whether what they have is celiac disease.
processed seed oils are in most foods we eat
This is dealing with a specific condition (MGD) but after the intro sections it describes how dietary omega fatty acids play into inflammation.
> The typical American and Northern European diet is high in omega-6 FAs, with the average person having an omega-6 to omega-3 FA intake ratio between 15:1 and 18:1. These populations tend to overconsume red meat and underconsume unprocessed oils and cold-water fish.
People who fixate on omega 6 and seed oils usually dismiss the downsides of saturated fat, as a rule. They will go on about the dangers of seed oil based on something that isn’t scientific consensus, yet the overwhelming balance of evidence against saturated fat doesn’t meet their epistemic standard.
Always awkward to watch.
> The notion that modern culinary oils containing high amounts of PUFA, particularly LA, are inflammatory is an idea that has managed to permeate virtually every diet camp imaginable. The paleo/ancestral nuts believe it. The vegan/plant-based nuts believe it. The keto/carnivore nuts believe it. Zealots belonging to Ray Peat's diet cult definitely believe it too. But is there actually evidence for this claim from human experiments?
Intrigued?
Make sure you’re not just regurgitating things to be true that you’ve merely heard repeated a thousand times online. Because that got me too not long ago.
The anti seed oil sophistry is one of the most ubiquitous nutrition misconceptions today. On social media, at least.
I also don’t see how a naturalistic fallacy is more convincing than human health outcome data. If novel foods like canola oil are worse than adapted foods like saturated fats, how come health outcomes improve when you swap saturated fat with canola oil?
In other words, if our best nutrition intervention data doesn’t meet your standard of evidence, then what is the alternative that does? Hand waving over some cozy claims about ancestral foods, evidence be damned?
But what I can do is look at the data we have for overall current human health outcomes, which are absolutely catastrophic considering the advances in medical technology. Clearly we’re eating something we shouldn’t, being exposed to something we shouldn’t, and/or doing things we shouldn’t, on a mass scale, beginning relatively recently.
These seems like as decent a culprit as any. The fact some shmuck in the 1870s London cesspool had a better life expectancy than me is disturbing. We’re clearly doing something massively wrong. I can’t control for pollutants and I get as much activity as I can, and diets the only other thing I can try to control. When we have bad outcomes and multiple changes at once, all I know to do is try to roll back the changes I have control over.
It's worth noting that this site appears to be the same type of "extreme diet camp" that the author pokes fun at. He appears to be a vegan (https://twitter.com/TheNutrivore) and advocate for pro-vegan views. Overall he seems to have the same epistemology MO as, eg., Ray Peat -- a cranky obsessive lay-person who primarily blogs at length for topics that interest him. I picked another article off his site at random and his own biases become quite apparent (https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-systematic-appraisal-of...).
The above preamble has no bearing on the PUFA question! I personally love cranky obsessive bloggers and genuinely look forward to reading more from this site. Open and honest debate, ftw.
Who cares which “camp” you reason yourself into if you actually reasoned yourself into it using real arguments and scrutinized syllogisms?
Most people don’t do anything like that. We usually just defend our creature comforts or we, for example, decide what we want to eat and then work backwards to cling on to anything that seems like it might validate us.
Meanwhile, Have you read Ray Peat? He’s the opposite of someone reasoning about the balance of evidence which is why he spends most of his time talking about the bottom of the hierarchy of evidence; anecdotes and rat studies.
Evolutionary pressures will make sure that organisms are very close to the edge between to weak and to strong.
One naive way of interpreting this is that 50% of the population will have a immune response that is to strong (above the edge) and 50% to weak (under the edge). But it is naive to say that, as this is a topic that has much more complexities than the one dimensional model that I have described here.
At what percentage the threshold of the statistics for what we call autoimmune disease would be located would be interesting to know.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-linked-to-40-increase-i...
Best is if your body ignores the plastic, that would mean the plastic doesn't do anything to you.
The issue with testosterone is that it's linked to an increase in hematocrit (level of red blood cells in blood). There's a band of hematocrit levels that's healthy for donation. If the hematocrit level is too high, it's potentially dangerous to the recipient, but too low a level of hematocrit makes the donation dangerous to the donor. As a result, hematocrit level testing is one of the few tests that they do before every single donation.
These chemicals aren't dangerous, they're present in all humans. No blood clotting is hemophilia, which is also a dangerous condition. Regular blood donation can prevent build-up, and the decrease in hematocrit after blood donation is one of the reasons for the required interval between donations.
What would happen during 'attack' is rather a clot forming, not very good ie in your bloodstream. Kind of pearls forming randomly in your body, but the seed would be a piece of plastic instead of a grain of sand, and it would be just your dead immunity cells around it. The chance of getting rid of it gets much smaller. Now why would you want something like that.
But if I hadn't been willing to power through the time and money and discomfort of getting tested, I probably would've remained undiagnosed for years. I'm thankful we caught it now and not before things got bad enough to land me in the hospital.
I would be interested in seeing some kind of long-term study of the appearance of reported symptoms that are associated with autoimmune disease, and not just the diagnosis of autoimmune disease. If rates of reported symptoms in the population are increasing, Then it's suggestive that the prevalence of disease is increasing, whereas if diagnoses are increasing but reported symptoms or not, it's indicative of better testing and a stable prevalence of disease.
Alergies is a clear sign that these are not 'hidden', 'waiting to be discovered' symptoms.
My personal view is that this a combination of the following top factors (in that order):
1) long-distance travel causing quick spreading of various infections illnesses stressing our immune system
2) Food (too much sugar and carbs)
3) Water and air pollution
4) vaccines 'boosters' chasing immunity to rapidly changing pathogens
http://www.betterhealthguy.com/images/stories/PDF/PHA/2009_0... (1. article)
Type 2 diabetes results from old age, sugar heavy diet etc.
Please learn the difference :(.