I was wondering if anyone has other ‘autoimmune’ related diseases along with MS? Also any intances in close family??
I’ve been searching on here for info/links and it’s an absolute nightmare! (yes - too much time on my hands at the moment and you can only take so much daytime TV!!!)
My symptoms all fit MS and most of the obvious ‘mimics’ have been ruled out. However my brain scan revealed lesions in th frontal lobe and a ‘significantly enlarged pituitary gland’. I have not had spinal MRI’s yet so have no idea whether there are lesions there.
The reason I’m interested is that my biological father had Addison’s Disease and post mortem they found he had died of a pituitary gland tumour that caused a stroke. He also had Pernicious Anaemia (and something else autoimmune related that I can’t remember!)
My mother has also suffered with Pernicious Anaemia plus severe vertigo and she has glaucoma(I’ve just been diagnosed with glaucoma too).
I’ve just got in touch with a cousin (long story relating to only finding out recently that my dad who brought me up wasn’t my biological dad) and she thinks her mother (bio father’s sister) had ‘unconfirmed’ MS and was a wheelchair user for years.
They’ve identified more than 50 genes that appear to be involved in MS. Most of them are also implicated in other auto-immune diseases. So there is very strong evidence of a relationship between MS and other auto-immune diseases: basically people may have similar “bad” genes, but what the genes trigger may vary between the people carrying them (and the environmental factors they are exposed to).
I think it’s fair to say that a lot if not most people with MS have people in their families with other auto-immune diseases.
My sis has a “benign” pituitary tumour (not so benign it doesn’t cause her problems), and on average, spends about as much time in the MRI machine as I do.
We’ve each told our respective consultants about the other, but neither thought it was significant.
So pituitary disease is not one I’m certain is related.
But there’s definitely higher than expected familial aggregation (clustering in families) with MS and some other diseases, notably diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, crohn’s disease and Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
I had a great auntie with MS, and another with Parkinson’s (both have been linked to mutations on the same chromosome).
I’m not sure what (if anything) my grandma was ever diagnosed with, but she used to suffer with open sores on her legs, which everyone seemed to accept as normal, because she’d always been like it, but I wonder now, what it was. Presumably auto-immune spectrum, I’m thinking. Some types of inflammatory arthritis can cause open sores, but if she’d ever been formally diagnosed with, say, RA, wouldn’t we have known?
Some things didn’t seem odd to me as a child, but looking back, it’s obvious she must have had some chronic condition, and it’s peculiar we don’t know what!
Yes I’m sorry to say that I have, I have Ankylosing Spondylitis, Lupus as well as RRMS. An uncle of mine had AS but to my knowledge no one in my family has had MS.
Just as an extra I also have APS and osteoporosis.But AS & Lupus are both autoimmune deseases.