Selective IgA Deficiency?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Do any of you have this or know someone who has it? My baby (almost 6 months) was just diagnosed with this after a series of very bad colds that turned into bronchiolitis. I have systemic lupus and have never been tested for IgA deficiency (I think), but it’s probably a good possibility I have it considering it’s genetic and can manifest itself as lupus.

I know that this deficiency is very common and that most people who have it don’t have any problems at all (and I question whether my baby’s colds were a result of it or just bad luck). I’m curious, though, about any of your experiences with it.

2

I’m no help with humans but I suspect there is a strain of mice with a similar mutation. I’ll ask around at work and get back to you. (Work is an immunology research lab. The boss is a pediatrician, so he may have heard of this.)

I hope you and your baby are doing well. :slight_smile:

Da Mouse

3

Thanks! We’ll be fine - I’ve been in remission for 15 years and my son’s main issue, at this point, is just that he gets colds all the time (which are hard for him because he’s so little, but will be easier as he gets older).

4

I have it - my mother has SLE as well. Plus we suspect my grandmother had SLE - symptoms were there, but obviously it was not diagnosed as much back then.

I didn’t know until I had a saddle clot in my lung last April and nearly cacked it. :frowning:

I’m also weakly positive for lupus anti-coagulant and being retested as the original tests were done in the hospital and the heparin I was on can (I’m told) influence the test.

Oddly, the hematologist said that SLE isn’t hereditary, despite my mom’s docs insisting that it is. When I brought that up she took some cheap shots at the US healthcare system, but I never got a straight answer. (I’m in the same position as you, an American married to an Australian living in Australia.)

I’m 38 if that helps, asthmatic, have always been prone to…well, not illness, but if most people catch a minor cold I get the horrible bronchitisy chesty thing and am sick for a week. But I don’t (didn’t, before this) get sick that often. I’m also really allergic - not food allergies, but pollen, dust, grass, mites, cats, dogs, etc. I gave up trying to prevent it, I have three cats and a dog and just deal with it and get medication to stop the symptoms. Everything makes me stuffy/sneezy/wheezy anyway, why not have what I want?

I really never did know, and always put my getting “extra-sick”, if you will, to just being asthmatic, but apparently its more than that. Doesn’t affect me much, otherwise.

And I’m fine now, really, just take rat poison daily, keep up with my asthma meds. I feel fine, back at the gym - bit more slowly than I was before, just getting over being tired all the time, but my doc says that’s due to the blood clot and getting over the stress of that. Prior to that, though, unless I was sick anyway it never affected me. I would be very ill maybe once or twice a year with really, really, really bad colds. Pneumonia twice, at 18 and 30.

Doc says I shouldn’t worry about it, that it just explains a lot of things that have happened to me illness-wise. She reckons it was the combination of that, plus my birth control pills (which I am no longer on) that gave me the clot, but doesn’t know for sure. (I don’t smoke, either - which is normally the risk factor for BCPs and blood clots.)

I live in fear of getting SLE myself, seeing what it has done to my mom - though she is in remission now for 5 years. The 10 years before that, though, were pretty bad.

Sorry for the ramble.

Cheers,
G

5

Gleena, we seem to have a lot in common. My mother does not have SLE, but has had weird autoimmune issues for years without any specific dianosis. My mother’s grandmother, we suspect, had SLE (wasn’t diagnosed that long ago, but suffered severe arthritis shortly after giving birth that eventually caused her to be an invalid for the rest of her life). I have one cousin (mother’s brother’s daughter) that has SLE.

When I was initially diagnosed (at 15), I went to one of the leading pediatric rheumatologists at the Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. He said that lupus is not directly hereditary, but the tendency to get it runs in families.

My little boy will probably, according to his pediatrician and our GP, outgrow all these bouts of bronchiolitis by the time he’s 2 or 3. He was only slightly low in IgA and one of the IgG factors. As I do further research on the internet (arming myself with questions for the next time we go in), I’m finding that being slightly low on these things at his age isn’t abnormal (the blood was drawn just before he turned 5 months), so I’m not very worried at this point about long term ramifications. The pediatrician did say he could develop asthma or respiratory allergies (and possibly food allergies, but he wasn’t as concerned about that). If he can dodge the asthma bullet and end up with slightly more annoying colds for the rest of his life, I can be happy with that.

6

Yeah, we do have a lot in common - the power of the Internet to show you that no matter how unique you think your situation is, it really isn’t! :slight_smile:

My google-fu has been kept in check regarding the IgA, to be honest, so I purposefully don’t know much about it. When I got sick in April I did some searches around what happened to me and scared myself so badly that I couldn’t sleep for days for fear I might die or something. (Yeah, I know, that’s silly - I lived to search Google, if I was going to drop dead I’d have done it when it first happened. Stupid brain!)

I really should research the lupus/heredity thing more. My mom’s SLE has really affected her whole life - not diagnosed until her mid-30s, but she had it long before that, but she’s the type that if she has less than a severed limb, she’ll ignore it and go on. Her short-term memory is now toast, but since her remission her knee and elbow joints don’t hurt and she goes along fine, just leaves herself sticky notes all over the place.

I have searched enough on IgA deficency to know that I agree with your doc (as much as I can, not being a medical professional myself) and that at most, it explains my asthma and tendency towards allergies and getting really sick with things that most people consider minor. I don’t actually think I’ve ever had a “minor” cold - in that my hubby gets the sniffles, goes to work and does fine and when I catch it off of him, I can’t breathe, can’t work and just am miserable for days. But as I said, that’s once a year, maybe. I just take really good care of myself and my lungs and do just fine. Eat well, get enough sleep, all that. If I don’t, I can tell - I feel tired and awful and I get sick.

One thing I will say is that it is good to know in advance that he might have allergies. I wish that mine had been dealt with in childhood. Things like being in PE and sitting on the grass to listen to instructions from teachers, for example - I would break out in hives where the grass touched me and itch like crazy. I hated sports and running and all that, and got tagged as lazy and fought constant battles with my weight because until recent years I wasn’t active enough - since most sports are outside, nobody understood that I really was miserable in the grass, pollen, mold spores and all that. I wish my mom had understood (back in the 70s, probably not, but still) that I just was miserable, itchy and wheezy rather than lazy.

You’re not far from me, from what you’ve said in previous posts, so I suspect that you’re at one of the children’s hospitals here. Both are great (my 11 year old has a few problems not related to this and they have been fantastic.)

I wouldn’t worry much unless your doc says to. It hasn’t been that big of an impact on me in the long term. I did have a lot of ear infections/illnesses as a small child, and those did set me back school-wise as I was out a lot, but that was a long time ago and times and medical knowledge have changed.

Cheers,
G