Lupus on Global News

I have hypersensitive hearing when it comes to Lupus and last night, I heard Global News mention Lupus, so of course I watched and found out that three genese were found so far that cause Lupus. Here is the article posted on Global TVs website.

Studies home in on lupus cause
JASMIN LEGATOS, The Gazette

After two strokes and seven years, Miriam Gaudelli was finally diagnosed with lupus at 21.

Now 25, Gaudelli, president of Lupus Canada for Quebec, often hears similar stories of sufferers misdiagnosed for years.

That's because the illness, dubbed the disease with a thousand faces, can affect the joints, kidneys, heart, skin and brain and requires three or four symptoms to occur simultaneously in order to be diagnosed, she said.

But now an international team of researchers, which includes a group from the Montreal Heart Institute, have discovered three genes that cause the illness.

"We can now study these genes to find out what they are doing in the normal state and what they are doing in the disease," said John Rioux, an associate professor of medicine at the Université de Montréal and a researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute.

In people affected by lupus, the immune system produces antibodies that attack their own tissues, resulting in inflammation of the specific tissue or the body's organs.

Lupus Canada estimates that anywhere between 15,000 and 50,000 Canadians have lupus and women are nine times more likely to develop the disease than men.

The new studies are also important because it's the first time scientists were able to scan all 30,000 genes in the human genome, Rioux said.

"(Before) you had to pick your favourite gene that you thought, in the scientific sense, had a role to play in the disease and do a genetic test," he said.

However technology developed in recent years leaves the guesswork behind, he added.

Although researchers know little about the three genes discovered in the study, they are the first pieces of a complex puzzle, Rioux said.
"If we can start building up a knowledge of these different pieces, we can figure out which genes go with which type of symptom. Then you can figure out how to better treat these patients."