Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
My name is Anisur Rahman,
and I'm a Professor of Rheumatology at University College London.
I'm going to be talking about systemic lupus erythematosus,
an autoimmune disease which I study and treat in my clinic.
I have no financial disclosures.
0:17
So what is SLE?
It's an autoimmune rheumatic disease and it's a very rare disease.
The recent data shows that it's prevalence in the United Kingdom is about 1 in 1,000.
It's far common in women than it is in men,
with the sex ratio being about nine to one,
and it's more common in some ethnic groups,
particularly African and Caribbean people.
SLE is truly systemic.
It can affect any organ or system in the body.
But, the most common effects are on the skin,
the joints, and the hair,
whereas the most severe effects are on the kidney,
the central nervous system, and the blood.
0:51
During this talk, I'm going to cover the following topics:
let's see the clinical features of the disease, the current therapy,
the way we manage lupus now,
and new therapies which have arisen over
the last 10 years as a result of better understanding of the pathogenesis of lupus.
1:09
In terms of clinical features,
the best way to think about this is to imagine you are a patient with lupus,
and you're thinking about what it's going to do to affect your future.
So, what sort of person are you going to be?
You're probably a woman,
as I say the ratio is nine to one,
and you're probably young.
Most people with lupus are in the childbearing years,
between 20 and 40.
So, you're a young woman,
you've never really been ill before,
and suddenly, you have this disease.
You may well be African,
Caribbean or Asian, and you may never have heard of this disease, it's very rare.
If you are diagnosed with diabetes,
you'd probably know somebody who had diabetes,
somebody in your family, maybe.
But if you're diagnosed with lupus,
you've probably never met anybody and maybe never even heard of it,
except on House, a program which was
notorious for the fact that they never diagnosed lupus.
