What I know: My father was diagnosed with lupus before he died. His doctor either said or speculated that the cause was one of Dad’s blood pressure medications. Dad died before changing drugs.
What I don’t know: When filling out a health questionnaire at a new doctor’s office, should I say that yes I have a family history of lupus because Dad was diagnosed, or no because it was (potentially) caused by a drug?
You have a family history of lupus now. It is clearly a genetically linked disease. A drug may have triggered the development of the disease in your father, but it’s likely the tendency was there, programmed into his genes.
At least the latest scientific evidence supports the above assertions.
A useful site: http://www.webhealth.co.uk/a_to_z_of_health/lupus.asp
Thanks, Qadgop.
Of course, that isn’t what I was hoping to hear, but I thank you all the same.
No problem. Just remember that biology isn’t destiny.
BTW, the association with lupus is much stronger if the female parent has it. Her daughter’s risk will be 1 in 40, and her son’s risk 1 in 250.
Was your dad on hydralazine or methyldopa? And was he given a definitive bonafide diagnosis of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, or just a lupus-like syndrome? If it was the latter, and it was from a drug, your chance of getting it isn’t really significantly greater than that of any other random person. Also, if they said he just had a lupus-like syndrome, I’d just put down on the form that he had a lupus-like syndrome.
A more technical yet more in depth lupus site: http://www.emedicine.com/EMERG/topic564.htm
Understand that I was getting the information from him rather than from his doctor, so I might be a bit wonky on the details.
He went to the doctor complaining of severe fatigue. He said that he kept telling himself he was just being lazy, but he finally decided the feeling wasn’t normal. They ran a series of tests and declared that he had tested positive for syphilis. According to Dad, syphilis was completely out of the question, so he ended up having a spinal tap done. After that, the doctor said that it was lupus but that it either was caused by one of his drugs or could have been caused by one of his drugs. I took his drug list and tried to do some research into which drug might be it since Dad wasn’t being exactly proactive. His drugs were not on any of the pages I found that listed the drugs that have the lupus triggering as a potential side effect. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what the drugs were (this was the fall of '03), just that they didn’t seem to be the most common ones implicated.
Dad decided he’d rather have lupus than fuss with changing prescriptions and, despite my being a pest about it, he stuck with that until his death. I live with the possibility that the lupus hastened his death and that I could have pushed harder.
Yeah, but he was a grownup who could make his own decisions, right? My own dad made his own choices, and died hard at age 63. He might have been able to stretch it out a few more months with other approaches, but he knew how he wanted to handle things.
There are worse things than not living as long as possible.
True. Dad died suddenly, but he didn’t get trapped in a nursing home or hospital or hospice.
I’ll just shake a metaphorical fist in his metaphorical direction at times.
From what I described above, does that sound like an actual diagnosis of lupus or a diagnosis of “maybe you’ve got lupus”? I know the spinal tap can rule out syphilis, but can it rule in lupus?
Spinal tap can rule in lupus involvement of the central nervous system at the time of the tap, but can’t really rule out lupus in the system.
Of course, if it looks like lupus on the spinal tap, and the blood serum ANA titers are positive, along with the anti DS DNA titers, then there’s little doubt.
Lupus can be a tough diagnosis to rule out completely.