May is Lupus Awareness Month
May 1, 2009 by blackgirlgrown
Filed under health and wellness
Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease that can affect various parts of the body, especially the skin, joints, blood, and kidneys. And research has found that this is a disease that disproportionally affects black women (one in 250) in the prime of their lives.
As the Lupus Foundation of America states:
In the United States, lupus is more common in people of color — African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders — than in the Caucasian population. It also appears that lupus develops at an earlier age and is more severe among members of these ethnic groups.
More than 90 percent of people with lupus are women. Symptoms and diagnosis occur most often when women are in their childbearing years, between the ages of 15 and 44. Symptoms of lupus will occur before age 18 in 15 percent of the people who are later diagnosed with the disease.
Journey to Wellness gives a good synopsis of what lupus feels like:
You’re a young African American woman with the aching, swollen joints of someone twice your age. You’re tired all the time – and hot. You’ve got tender glands and a sensitivity to light that has you reaching for sunglasses whenever you’re in daylight. You’ve developed a rosy-red rash across the t-zone of your face, your hands and upper back. When you take a long, deep breath your chest often hurts and there’s an unusual amount of hair in your comb and hairbrush. What is going on?
Taken separately, these symptoms could represent any number of health conditions. Together, they’re typical of Lupus, an auto-immune disease of unknown origins that strikes one in 250 African American women – a number that means it’s twice as common in women of color as White women.
Learn the facts:
blackgirlgrown
