autoimmune diseases

Yes I have graves......thyroid.

In general, anyone who has one autoimmune disorder is is more likely to develop another than someone who doesn't have one.

PMR can always be the first to appear - for example, I am not aware of having had anything else before the PMR. But you will find plenty of people on the forums who have more than one autoimmune disorder.

Some people never get a fixed name for their autoimmune disorder - they have many symptoms that are common to all and then there are specific ones which used to result in a name. In the meantime it has been realised that some patients may appear with symptoms that used to be ascribed to different disorders and also the developments in immunology and other lab sciences has changed the criteria with things that weren't measurable when the diseases were first identified. So now someone may be offered a label of Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease - a mishmash of several things. At some later point it may firm up into something more identifiable with earlier named illnesses. Or it may not.

I always think of autoimmune disorders as being like a shop counter with a load of shelves with boxes on them containing signs and symptoms. We queue up and get handed a selection, willy nilly sometimes. The label we get later often depends on what it resembles most. And sometimes it doesn't look like anything at all - so they just say UCTD and the patient goes home upset they didn't get told something recognisable, like lupus or PMR or RA. 

It's only recently that I understood it was relevant but I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis (as far as I know unsymptomatic) in my 30s, probably had it far longer.  Also had contact dermatitis as a child and still have sensitive skin.

I think yes.

I have had vitiligo and contact dermatitis most of my life. 2 bouts of PMR. They ALL wax and wane for me. 

I have had chronic seborrheic dermatitis for over 40 years. Was told it was an autoimmune disease potentially caused by poisonous paint I scraped and sanded from the bottom of sailing yachts. It's not a big problem but it never cured.

Yes I was dx with hyperthyroidism in my early 40's, rec'd radioiodine treatment, ten years later I became hypothyroid. One year ago, and MUCH older, I was dx with PMR and still have it.

Before my PMR I was diagnosed with GCA and PBC. The docs now think it's just a fatty liver even though I have antimitochondrial antibodies,  a marker for PBC. None of the docs can explain that even at Mayo. My heart electrical problems, requiring a pacemaker, may also be related to autoimmune. My mom died of complications from lupus and also had Reynauds and scleraderma.

 

I am not sure about this but my sister has Lupus and I have always thought we are similar in terms of autoimmune diseases.

my jury is still out,

however, the more I research auto-immune the more I find (of course ...).

While looking at "pain" I came across the possibility of an autoimmune cause for migraine and "new daily persistent headache" which I'd never heard of but suffice to say I've suffered a headache most of my life without ever getting a diagnosis but lots of failed treatment attempts.

About 15 years ago I copped Hashimoto's disease (hypo-thyroid).

PMR arrived a couple of years ago.

Though it is an intetresting subject to find out if a majority of PMR/GCA patients has had an autoimmune disease before in their lives, we have to be careful about drawing conclusions about a relationship or even more difficult to prove a causality between them. If we find a minority has had no autoimmune disease before, then perhaps they may not have realized it? Or more damaging for causality, if we find that many more people that had an autoimmune disease do never develop PMR/GCA... This seems likely, since many forms of autoimmune diseases are much more common than our disease.