Patients with rheumatoid arthritis are at higher risk for some forms of cancer, explains W. Hayes Wilson, MD, chief of rheumatology at Piedmont Hospital. But in this video, he says that treating rheumatoid arthritis can reduce the risk.
Patients who have an abnormal immune system because their immune system is attacking them. It also is being, what I like to think of it, is distracted against getting rid of other things. So, for instance, you're more likely to have infection because your immune system is distracted taking care of or causing rheumatoid arthritis, and so when we think that the medicines might be causing more infections, it could be that you are allowed to have more infections because you have rheumatoid arthritis. The same is true about cancer. So our immune systems everyday, every moment of every day is doing surveillance, it's looking for cancer cells, everybody makes cancer cells, and they make cancer cells every day and your immune system kills it.
And when your immune misses a cancer cell, or it doesn't recognize it's a cancer cell and it continues to grow, that's when we say somebody has cancer. Well, for instance, in rheumatoid arthritis, even well treated rheumatoid arthritis, the chance of cancer is three times that over the general population. The problem that people sometimes have, is the way that it is reported by the Federal Drug Administration, is that if you take good treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, your chance of having lymphoma, for instance, is three times that of the general population.
What they fail to say, is that if you have severe rheumatoid arthritis and you don't take treatment, your chances are 25 times that over the general population, so unfortunately, just having rheumatoid arthritis increases your chances, and actually, treating the rheumatoid arthritis makes your chances better.
So, infection and cancer are more common in patients with auto-immune disease because their immune system is out of whack.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that causes joint inflammation and triggers pain, swelling, fatigue and other symptoms. Find out how to treat and manage rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups.
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