Study finds autoimmune diseases affect more people than scientists thought

Autoimmune disease awareness has become far more prevalent with the advancement of modern medicine. But a worrying study from May 2023 found that these dangerous and sometimes life-threatening conditions occur in people far more often than researchers previously thought.

Published in The Lancet, this groundbreaking population-based study looked at 22 million people living in the United Kingdom and looked at nineteen of the most common autoimmune diseases that occur in humans. After examining the data the researchers found something shocking.

Researchers discovered that one in ten people they studied were affected by an autoimmune disease and added that those who were impacted were likely to be even more burdened by their condition the longer that they lived with it.

Previous estimates of autoimmune prevalence put the number of people suffering from autoimmune diseases in the population at somewhere between 3% to 9% according to the University of Oxford. 

Women seemed to develop autoimmune diseases more often based on the research with 13.1% of those studied having one of the nineteen most common autoimmune conditions. 

On the other hand, only 7.4% of men studied had developed an autoimmune condition, which meant that there was some evidence of gender variation in the rates of diseases. 

Socioeconomic factors also played an important role in some autoimmune conditions and the study’s authors noted the factor was “evident across several diseases.”

Graves’ disease, pernicious anemia, and rheumatoid arthritis were three prominent autoimmune conditions the study’s authors could link to one’s socioeconomic status. 

Interestingly, the researchers also discovered that some of the autoimmune diseases they studied were subject to both seasonal and regional variations in their participants. 

For example, childhood-onset type-1 diabetes was found to be diagnosed more often in winter while the pigment-altering condition vitiligo was diagnosed more in the summer. 

Some conditions were also very strongly associated with others and the study’s authors found that people with type-1 diabetes were more likely to also have Addison’s disease. 

Sjögren’s syndrome, systemic sclerosis, and systemic lupus erythematosus also had very high rates of co-occurrences while conditions like coeliac disease, thyroid disease, and multiple sclerosis had little to no rates of co-occurrences with other conditions according to the study. 

“We observed that some autoimmune diseases tended to co-occur with one another more commonly than would be expected by chance or increased surveillance alone,” the study's lead author Dr. Nathalie Conrad said according to the University of Glasgow. 

"This could mean that some autoimmune diseases share common risk factors, such as genetic predispositions or environmental triggers,” the study’s lead author continued. 

Dr. Conrad added that conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and some endocrine diseases fell into the category of co-occurring disorders but noted the issue was not generalized. 

“This remarkable report documents changing patterns of immune diseases over two decades in the UK,” added the study’s co-author Professor Ian McInnes. 

“These conditions pose a huge burden on individuals and upon wider society and currently represent an enormous unmet clinical need,” McInnes added, which was a point certainly well made considering the huge change in disease rates that the study recorded. 

The University of Glasgow published a press release on the study and explained that autoimmune diseases occur when a person's immune system begins mistakenly attacking normal cells in the body.