A recent study conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), an agency of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), shows that 32 million people in the United States have autoantibodies, the most common of which are antinuclear antibodies (ANA). According to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA), while the study is significant in that it is the first to investigate the presence of autoantibodies in the U.S. population, the results are far from unexpected. ""The study does not surprise us at AARDA as we have known that the number of autoimmune diseases have been increasing significantly within the past decade. What we don't know is why," says AARDA's President and Executive Director Virginia T. Ladd.
According to NIEHS Director Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., the answer as to why autoimmune diseases are on the rise, may be all around us. "Some of this may be due to environmental influences. We need to continue the research momentum that we have been building over the last few years to better understand how autoimmune diseases develop so we can better predict and eventually prevent the development of some autoimmune diseases."
Not everyone who tests positive for ANA goes on to develop autoimmune disease. In fact, according to Noel R. Rose M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Autoimmune Disease Research at Johns Hopkins University, this study sets the stage for future research as to why some individuals go on to develop autoimmune disease, after testing positive for ANA, and some do not. Dr. Rose states, "This landmark study focuses our attention on the critical question of how often a person with ANA goes on to actual clinical disease. That question must be addressed in this oncoming age of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine."
According to AARDA, the study findings may indicate a larger issue impacting the health of the U.S. population. With 32 million Americans exhibiting autoantibodies, the real question may be, why and what can we do about it? According to Ladd, policy makers can't effectively act on behalf of research priorities for autoimmune disease because they don't have accurate data depicting the problem. She says, "Autoimmune diseases are a significant factor in the cost of health care in the U.S. However, there is no study that provides detailed data on the true cost of autoimmune diseases in this country. Diseases are generally tracked separately by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) rather than by category of disease. However AHRQ does not have tracking codes for all of the 100+ autoimmune diseases, without which it is nearly impossible to find the cost and true impact of these diseases. Not only do we not know the cost, but additionally, we don't have studies on the epidemiology of individual autoimmune diseases. Currently studies exist on only 24 of the 100+ diseases. How can policy makers act when they do not have the data to understand the impact these diseases are having on their constituents? "
According to NIEHS, this study is the first in a series that will investigate changes in ANA prevalence over time and additional factors that may be associated with ANA development, such as environmental factors.
While NIEHS's study leads to more questions, researchers and advocacy groups like AARDA see this data as an important first step that will open up new areas of progress in autoimmune disease prevention and treatment.
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