Scleroderma, symptoms, causes and treatment, which will be considered here, refers to chronic autoimmune diseases. It leads to a thickening of the skin, a deterioration in its elasticity. In addition, it can lead to damage to internal organs, as well as to an increase in the thickness of the walls of blood vessels. Most often, women who are thirty to fifty years old suffer from it. Men get sick about six times less often.
Reasons for its appearance
No one knows for sure why scleroderma appears. A forum on the Internet, a medical textbook, or even a medical consultant can only name approximate circumstances in which its occurrence becomes possible. It is believed that its appearance and development occurs under the influence of any external factors in those people who have specific genetic disorders. To the external factor, which may well become the reason for its appearance, one can safely attribute coal tar, as well as quartz dust, various retroviruses, medical devices that are used in chemotherapy, and organic solvents.
Scleroderma: symptoms
It can be calculated by specific lesions of the skin, musculoskeletal system, blood vessels, gastrointestinal tract, heart, lungs, and other internal organs. The whole point is that all of the above is damaged at the same time.
Scleroderma, the symptoms of which we consider, is very often accompanied by Raynaud's syndrome, in which, under stress or when exposed to low temperatures, spasms of the vessels of the skin located on the fingers of the limbs periodically occur. With this syndrome, as a rule, the color of the fingers changes.
As mentioned above, with scleroderma, a thickening or thickening of the skin occurs - this also applies to those symptoms that are very specific and can be easily detected. First of all, the skin on the hands begins to deteriorate, and then on the entire remaining surface of the body. In general, it is worth noting that skin problems torment patients with scleroderma for three to five years from the moment the disease began to actively progress, since over time these lesions will remain only on their feet.
Scleroderma, the symptoms of which are numerous, can cause joint pain and stiffness throughout the body in the early stages. Muscle damage occurs a little later, and its consequence is muscle weakness.
Ninety percent of people affected by this disease suffer from problems with the gastrointestinal tract. Troubles with the esophagus begin with the fact that it becomes difficult for a person to swallow food. This problem in some cases can cause a lot of discomfort. Patients experience discomfort in the abdomen, suffer from heartburn, diarrhea or constipation.
Lungs suffer in seventy percent of all cases. The most common problems with them in scleroderma are persistent coughing, as well as shortness of breath.
Symptoms include numerous problems with the thyroid gland.
Scleroderma: treatment
In order to get rid of it, you will have to spend many years. As a rule, treatment is outpatient. Of the medicines, the patient is prescribed corticosteroids, vasodilators, various derivatives of aminoquinoline, as well as those drugs that can improve microcirculation. In the case of a chronic disease, a person is prescribed radon and hydrogen sulfide baths (balneotherapy), and joint damage can be treated with the help of special physiotherapy exercises, as well as massage.
This disease cannot be simply taken and treated, which means that doctors for the most part are fighting not with itself, but with its symptoms.