Characterized by shifting pains of small joint, numbness, swelling, red swollen joints. Joint stiffness in the morning lasting for 1 to 2 hours or pain may last for whole day, generally aggravates in winters or cold climate. Patient may feel better on movement of joints. Other symptoms may include mild fever, lack of appetite, fatigue, Myalgia. Generally, it starts in the age of 30 to 50 years of age. Females are more affected than males.
RA is an autoimmune disease. This means that your own immune system starts working against you. Normally our immune system is designed to identify the foreign particles like bacteria, virus, fungus, and other disease-causing germs and to kill them. But in arthritis the person immune system becomes hyperactive and creates lots of inflammation. That inflammation is sent to the joints where it causes a lot of inflammation and damages the joints.
If continued for a longer period it may cause irreparable damage to the joints creating nodules in the joints and deforming the joints. Its exact cause is not yet known but heredity is one of the factors. If any one of your parents is suffering from the RA, you may be carrying defective genes and you are more prone to the disease. Though according to the theory of epigenetics one may be carrying many defective genes but the disease may not present itself until the disease-causing genes are triggered.
The question comes how my own immune system starts working against my own body? What went wrong? Our immune system is a very dynamic system which is on vigil to destroy the harmful disease-causing agents entering our body through food, breathe, skin etc. It would identify the antigen and would destroy it by either secreting the antigens or by trapping and killing it. How our immune system identifies which particle is harmful and which is not? Just try to understand a busy highway where thousands of cars are entering daily in the city, how the police would identify a terrorist, a thief, or any antisocial element? Police cannot stop and cross check each and every vehicle entering the city as it may create chaos and long ques would pile up in no time which may take hours or even days to clear. So, police rely on intelligence system that would indicate about the probable car number, the timing and identification of the vehicle so that it can be sorted.
Similarly, our immune system identifies the antigens by a presence of certain intelligence like proteins, nucleotide present on the antigen and attacking it by disintegrating the structure. But why your immune system starts working against your own body. Your gut health is to be blamed for such a fiasco. Whatever we eat goes to the gut first, then it is the digestive system’s job to digest and disintegrate the complex food particles into smaller particles through various enzymatic activities.
Like Proteins are broken into amino acids, Carbohydrates are broken into Monosaccharides and fats into fatty acids. But if due to imbalance foods, wrong food combinations, eating one kind of food, sedentary lifestyle, smoking, addictions when the digestive system is not performing well and the walls of intestine are broken, undigested food particles gets absorbed into the blood and our immune system will be activated perceiving the undigested food to be foreign body and would attack it and forming inflammatory molecules and deposit it into the lymphatic system for detox. When this process continues for a longer period, our immune system would become hyper vigil and would start attacking the joints also leading to inflammation and swelling.
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