Prof. Brigid Kwiatkowska says why women are a special group of patients, what the consequences are and what we can do.
Autoimmune diseases mainly affect women. What about vaccinations?
Published April 3, 2024 10:53
Autoimmune diseases mostly affect women. These people often take immunosuppressive drugs, which increase the risk of hemiplegia. What can we do?
Autoimmune diseases mainly affect women. In women, there is additionally a phenomenon that is called polyautoimmunity, that is, the occurrence of one autoimmune disease increases the risk of the occurrence of another. These diseases can be as many as five, from different medical fields, and require treatment. On the other hand, during autoimmune diseases, we have to include certain medications that, first of all, can increase the risk of reactivation of certain diseases, including the risk of reactivation of hemiplegia, which makes it absolutely necessary in the group of patients with autoimmune diseases to follow the principle of vaccination for all possible diseases with the available vaccines that we have. So here there is vaccination for influenza and for covid-19 annual, vaccination for hemiplegia, for pneumococcus. And this applies to people in every age group, not people 65 plus, for whom we have dedicated reimbursable vaccines. Hence, I will take such a fight so that for our patients, mainly women with autoimmune diseases, there will be the possibility of reimbursed vaccination for those diseases that are really necessary to be performed, including hemiplegia.
We are increasingly talking about the adult vaccination calendar. What are the recommendations here?
In rheumatic diseases, we have had American and EULAR recommendations on vaccination for several years now. We always pay attention to this and make our patients aware of the absolute necessity of vaccination. On the other hand, it is very often the case that the knowledge of other specialties, including family doctors, about our diseases is so small that the moment a patient comes to a family doctor and asks at least to be vaccinated for any disease, he is sent away because it is impossible because he has an autoimmune disease. We will try to spread this knowledge, including among patients, so that they are absolutely not afraid of vaccination, because vaccination in autoimmune diseases is absolutely safe. We have mainly inactivated vaccines. There are no live vaccines, so you can be vaccinated at any stage of the disease.
