Understanding Lupus Nephritis and Symptoms and Risk Factors
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Kyle Riding
In this program:
What is lupus nephritis, and what do patients need to know? Medical laboratory scientist Dr. Kyle Riding discusses lupus nephritis, common symptoms, and risk factors for developing the condition.
Transcript
Interviewer:
What exactly is lupus, and what is lupus nephritis? And who is at risk of it?
Dr. Kyle Riding:
So lupus is an autoimmune condition, and what that means is your immune system is really only meant to attack foreign invaders. We go through a developmental process with our immune system as infants where your immune system gets trained, "Hey, this is a cell of ours. Anything else is foreign and we attack it." Okay? But in an autoimmune condition, your immune system goes haywire and it starts attacking your own cells. In the case of systemic lupus erythematosus aka SLE, aka lupus, has lots of names to it, okay? Basically it's called a systemic autoimmune condition, meaning it impacts all different cells and tissues throughout your body. Now, I want to mention some of the symptoms.
Some of the symptoms include fatigue, fever, pain, swelling in the joints. It can kind of be like a viral infection that just keeps coming back. But one of the other telltale signs are rashes that can happen, which can happen with certain viral infections, but it doesn't happen in every case. But in some cases of lupus, patients get a very characteristic butterfly rash on their face, which, I'll take my glasses off to kind of demo this. Basically meaning they get a red rash going from the..basically following their cheek bones and going back up under their eyes and across the bridge of their nose. And it kind of looks like a butterfly's wings. That can be a real telltale sign of lupus. So if you have that, definitely go to your physician and say, "Hey, I got a butterfly rash. What's going on here?" Okay?
Now, the problem with lupus, it's attacking all these different organs in your body including your kidneys. And the cells in your kidneys that do all the work are called nephrons. And so they're damaged as part of this disease process, and so they get inflamed. So we call that lupus nephritis or inflammation, that "itis" you hear in different medical conditions, and nephrons. So nephritis is where we get it. All patients with lupus are at an elevated risk of getting lupus nephritis. And really, if you have lupus, this is a something to worry about and keep an eye on because the disease can damage those kidneys.
Now, what patients are at a higher risk for getting lupus in general? Well, number one, women. They're pretty much...nine out of 10 autoimmune conditions, unfortunately, women are at a higher risk than men. Additionally, Black patients, Hispanic patients, Asians, indigenous cultures, they are all at a higher risk than white or Caucasian populations. So the action item I have here is, if you have some kind of funky illness going on, you got some fever, you're really tired, there's pain and swelling in the joints, those could be signs of lupus. They could be signs of something else too. They're very non-specific.
But if your healthcare provider can't narrow it down to something else and they're not really doing anything, advocate for yourself and say, "Hey, can I get an anti-nuclear antibody test performed?" also known as an ANA test. That is the laboratory test that screens, not only for lupus, but several other autoimmune conditions can be detected with the ANA. The earlier you get diagnosed with the lupus, the sooner a rheumatologist can manage the condition, and the sooner you can start preventing the risk or limiting the risk of lupus nephritis.
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