for a LONG time is WHY are women the ones suffering from autoimmune diseases and not men? And WHY has this not been more researched? (Hint: Because obviously, it's a "woman's" disease!)
It seems obvious to me it's linked in someway to our hormones, except that for some of these autoimmune diseases it seems they happen later in life, or they happen after certain events happen. Of course, correlation does not equal causation and that muddies the water. For example, they found that women having hip replacement surgery were often diagnosed with lupus or fibromyalgia within 3 months of the surgery. That's what happened to me. I was diagnosed with both within 3 months of my hip replacement.
But, talk about muddying the waters... the hip replacement and diagnoses were a couple of decades AFTER I'd had a hysterectomy. Now, I'd only had a partial hysterectomy, and I'd been on HRT for a long while, so I guess I could have had some hormones running around in there, but I'd lay odds they were few and far between. No hot flashes, no night sweats, etc. etc.
So far, these researchers seem pretty convinced we carry a gene that gets "turned on" due to some environmental event. Where is it located? What type of event turns it on? Could we have all been placed at this disadvantage beginning in the 1950's and '60's with the advent of the intense pollution we all were subjected to at that time?
I'm not a chemist or a biologist. If this stuff had hit me when I was younger, I'd probably have gone into those fields instead of into psychology. I'd probably made a better living - cause I ended up making a career in computers! (LOL) Now that I'm older with fewer brain cells, the fields are far beyond me. But damn, they're not beyond my interest. Especially not as I see so many of my friends daughters and granddaughters fall to the diseases.
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