3 ms·

Any thoughts as to why autoimmune diseases are (or at least seem) more prevelent in the 1st world?

• colechristensen 5y ago
  Four candidates: hygiene, better diagnostics, different exposures, longer safer lives.
• Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  If your country doesn't have a medical system that will detect such things in the general population and does not have a system to get the numbers for statistics, how are you going to know how prevalent something is? We don't know how common lots of things are in 1st world countries either, simply because we don't track.
• epgui 5y ago
  Broadly speaking, the hygiene hypothesis is the current leading explanation. To make an analogy, in AI/ML terms, it amounts to a training set problem: you're not exposed to a diverse enough set of microbes and pathogens, or you're exposed to a biased sample, or you're not exposed to enough microbes. Your immune system's role is to act as a classifier to discriminate between good and bad, self and non-self. When you have a bad training set, you increase the odds that good things will be identified as bad, or that self antigen will be recognized as foreign.
• dham 5y ago
  Parasites. When you start getting rid of parasites in 3rd world communities, auto immune issues start to crop up. It's thought that since the body isn't fighting off parasites then it sits idle and starts attacking itself. It kind of makes sense from a purely evolutionary perspective. There's actually been treatments for some auto immune diseases that involve giving a relatively harmless parasite to people.
• f6v 5y ago
  They’re just probably under-diagnosed in the 3rd world.