Episode 01: Welcome to Success with Sjogren's!
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Kara Wada, MD: Are you sick of the fatigue and fog? Fed up with unpredictable flares? Hangry from the super restrictive diets? Hello, and welcome to Success with Sjogren's, a podcast empowering naturally minded and scientifically grounded women looking to reduce or even eliminate their Sjogren's symptoms. Hi, I'm Wada, a fellow Sjogren's Spoonie, triple board certified allergy, immunology, and lifestyle medicine physician.
Coach, medical educator, and mom. As a reminder, although I am a physician, I'm not your physician, and this podcast is for educational purposes only.
Welcome to episode one, the who, what, when, where, and why. I am so excited to welcome you to the first official podcast, an episode of Success with Sjogren's. Over the coming weeks and months, my guests and I will share how modern medicine and lifestyle work better together. You're probably wondering, what exactly does an allergy immunology physician do?
In its simplest definition, I see children and adults with misbehaving immune systems. I primarily see patients who are struggling with seasonal allergies, chronic sinus problems, asthma, food allergies, allergic skin rashes. And conditions that cause hives and swelling. And although less common, because I work in an academic or a big medical center, I also care for patients who have some more rare conditions that affect the immune system, including those with misbehaving mast cells and other allergy cells called eosinophils, and those patients with immune deficiencies or who are born with lower ability to fight infections.
When we think about immune systems misbehaving, allergies, autoimmune diseases, and these immune deficiencies All signal to me, and now hopefully will signal to you too, that the immune system is dysregulated, which means it's out of balance. So in the case of allergies and autoimmunity, the immune system is recognizing something that's the enemy that really it should be tolerating or ignoring.
In the case of allergies, it may see peanut or pollen as the enemy, or in the case of autoimmunity, it may see some of our own proteins or tissues as the enemy and try to destroy them. uNfortunately, both of these types of conditions can occur. And occur more often when there's an immune deficiency, too.
Unfortunately, for many people, these conditions can come together. In short, the immune system gets complicated really quickly and when things go awry, they tend to happen together. Why is an allergist immunologist talking about Sjogren's? First of all, because I have it. But I also see quite a few patients who have Sjogren's syndrome as well.
Sjogren's syndrome is a chronic autoimmune condition where the body recognizes our exocrine glands, which is a fancy word for the glands that produce moisture in our body. And it destroys these glands over time. These glands are the glands that produce tears, saliva, sweat, breast milk, skin oils, mucus, and even more.
When Sjogren's occurs what is happening are white blood cells, which are typically infection fighting cells called lymphocytes, they relocate to these exocrine glands, or these moisture producing glands. and they cause inflammation there. And the inflammation in these glands results in tissue destruction.
The end result ends up being the classic symptoms that we know are associated with Sjogren's, so dryness. But as most of us know, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Over 90 percent of us will also experience Fatigue, chronic pain, which may affect our joints or other parts of our body, and digestive problems.
And traditionally, the other complicating factor is Sjogren's has been classified in two different ways, as primary or secondary, meaning that it can be an autoimmune disease diagnosed on its own, or those symptoms may be related to another connective tissue or autoimmune condition. Like lupus, for instance, how and why this happens is not really fully understood, but we will continue to take a deep dive into the science of Sjogren's in future episodes.
In short, there's a combination of both underlying susceptibility and environmental triggers that are implicated in the development of Sjogren's syndrome. So who does Sjogren's affect? It's estimated that there are four million Americans, the vast majority of those being women, over 90 percent of patients with Sjogren's are women, that have Sjogren's syndrome.
And the average age of diagnosis is around 40, but there are people across the age and gender spectrum that are diagnosed and deal with Sjogren's syndrome. What's unfortunate is that recognition of Sjogren's is usually delayed, and for many people can take several years before symptoms are recognized as being caused and diagnosed as Sjogren's.
So why am I here? Goodness, there have been so many reasons over the last few years, and I almost hesitate like where to start. When I was first diagnosed, I was incredibly overwhelmed, and after I got out of that initial overwhelmed period, I really had some soul searching of, okay, this is my field, in many degrees and I have some of this medical knowledge and background, and I still was completely overwhelmed with this experience.
That didn't protect me, or from developing this, and it also didn't fully insulate me from the full experience of being diagnosed with a chronic condition. And when I was exhausted and in pain, both the physical pain and then the emotional pain associated with that knowledge that I was no longer the healthy person that I had always thought myself to be.
I, I was just, I was totally overwhelmed and so after the initial shock wore off and I dried my tears I found myself really frustrated in many ways. I was frustrated that Sjogren's lacked effective disease modifying treatments, so effective like good medications that similar conditions like rheumatoid arthritis had.
I had really seen a huge increase in the availability and the effectiveness of those medications. And as I looked to take ownership of my own health and do my best to ensure I was doing the most I could to keep myself healthy, to be the best mom and doctor that I could be I found myself searching high and low for any and all kind of other options.
that might be out there that could optimize my health. So what could I do from a nutrition or dietary standpoint? Were there particular vitamins or supplements or particular exercises that I might try to do to optimize my health? You name it, I looked into it. And sadly though, what I found was a lot of speculation, a lot of slick sales pitches, And very little science to support the use of things people were claiming were these miracle cures.
So with my medical background and, the knowledge to be able to look up references and and having access to medical journals it made sense for me to, as I was embarking on this journey and as I was going through this whole processing process, that I needed to approach things from the perspective of and, rather than or.
So how could I use modern medicine and adjust my daily habits to improve my health? And I also started exploring kind of what other science was out there, since there isn't a whole ton specifically related to Sjogren's. I looked to see, what were the studies for asthma or thyroid disease or other or, more well studied conditions.
What had they demonstrated could improve inflammation? So what types of dietary changes, what types of vitamin problems and and so forth. Interestingly, I also started thinking back to other points in time in my medical education journey. Interestingly enough I knew stress was a huge factor in immune system health, primarily because the research had been performed where I practice.
And so there are some pretty famous, there's a famous couple of scientists who studied the effect of stress on medical students immune systems decades ago, and that really was instrumental in Proving this link between our fight or flight responses and how that affects our immune system.
All that said though, I struggled to find resources that had a basis in science and I also struggled to find resources that were specific for Sjogren's. So with that in mind, several years out from my diagnosis. Still continuing on my own healing journey, because I will always be a work in progress. I am committed even more to my oath to do no harm, which means many things, but in particular taking a look at the possible risks and benefits of any particular treatment or testing modality.
Trying to keep my own personal biases and in mind, and to recognize those as I approach my opinions on particular approaches. anD I'm really committed to building this shogun sisterhood community. What I noticed online, unfortunately, Was a lot of negativity and I don't want to get into spilling over into the toxic positivity, but I know from studying mindfulness and self compassion and going through coaching training that an awful uplifting space where each of us can say Goodbye to our fog and fatigue, and really imagine the possibility, and truly believe the possibility that we can rediscover our vibrant, confident selves is possible and very achievable.
The reality is that the vast majority of us with Sjogren's will not have our lives shortened by this disease, but we know that the symptoms we face can really take their toll on our quality of life. So over the coming weeks and months and hopefully years, I look forward to sharing with you what tips, tools, techniques I have used and continue to use to forge my own path towards success with Sjogren's, so that you too might be able to find your own version of success with this disease.
I look forward to sharing with you new episodes each week, and in the coming weeks, we'll be talking about nutrition, fatigue, fibromyalgia, chronic pain. digestive issues and nutrition and while getting tips as I discuss these issues with other health care professionals, many of whom also happen to be autoimmune patients themselves.
I look forward to being able to bring all these experts to you so you can learn directly from them and we can continue to do this all together in this community. So welcome again. Thank you for joining me. And to make sure you don't miss an episode, please hit subscribe. And while you're at it, if you think of it, maybe share this with another Shogun sister and think about leaving a review.
Take care and we'll talk again soon next week.
