Friday, September 23, 2011

Kissing Cousins of RA

A very dear friend of mine called me the other day to say that her sister was recently diagnosed with hepatitis C.  Immediately I thought of a blood transfusion as the cause. Boy, did I have something to learn. She in fact was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis. What in the world is this?

And that was the inspiration for this post. The longer I am blogging, the more I learn and the more I have to learn about what seems like to me, the many autoimmune illnesses that are kissing cousins of ra.  Yes, I know, what a lovely thought.  More things to possibly have to worry about.  But I am putting this information out there because so many of us have so many symptoms that just don't quite fit under that tidy one diagnoses we were given.

So here goes! Here are some of the kissing cousins of ra...

Medline Plus gives us the following examples of (kissing cousins of ra) autoimmune diseases:

And if that isn't enough to digest, here are a few more that I recently found out about!
I have no doubt I have missed a few of our cousins out there. So if you know of any others, ask them to join this dysfunctional family through a comment.