What sorts of problems might a person with an autoimmune disease run into with pregnancy?

Well, if I remember correctly, you have UC and have had a colectomy? If that’s the case, you should theoretically be cured so it should be fine.

@Rarebear Yes, you’re remembering correctly, but (correct me if I’m wrong) removing the colon does not change the root of the issue, which is that my immune system is hyper-vigilant. I also have a lot of bizzaro allergies and get pleurisy fairly often, so it seems my immune system is still “acting up.”

But I still love the word “cured” and it makes me feel good to hear that you think it would be okay, thank you for that.

@Mariah I’ll do some more formal research on it and get back to you.

By the way, outstanding blog post on the Naturalist Fallacy. I shared it with my Bay Area Skeptic friends on Facebook.

I’m not sure about the overall risk with AI diseases and pregnancy, but I know that certain AI diseases are a problem during pregnancy. Two that I have were greatly affected by my three pregnancies.

A) This one was more of a threat to my babies. I had Graves disease (hyperthyroidism) when I was younger, and my thyroid kind of killed itself after a thyroid storm, so now I have hypothyroidism. During my first pregnancy, it went waaaay out of whack, and was a huge struggle to get it back to the normal zone before the births (if it’s bad enough at the time of birth, it can cause permanent brain damage to the infant).

B) This one was more of a threat to me. I also have kidney disease, and the kind I’m presumed to have is an AI type (IgA Nephropathy). I didn’t even know I had it until I started having babies. Pregnancy is very hard on the kidneys, and mine were further damaged with each successive baby. Each pregnancy was higher risk than the last, I frequently ended up on bed rest, and all three of my children were induced early to stop me from getting sicker and/or dying.

Certainly not all autoimmune diseases are created equally, you are absolutely correct. I was talking more specifically about Mariah’s condition.

Thank you very much, @Rarebear!

@augustlan Eek, sounds like your pregnancies were pretty scary! I have a neighbor who had horrible thyroid problems during her pregnancies and I know she was very, very sick. Scary stuff for sure. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

At this stage in the game I don’t have enough confidence in my body to believe I could ever have a successful pregnancy, but I don’t have a concrete reason for feeling that way other than paranoia. I would definitely have to get a c-section because of my surgery, which sucks. I’m sure there are other risks too, hence this question, and of course I’d have to consider the possibility of passing the disease onto the child too. If I do end up wanting kids, I probably should and will adopt.

There’s a Wikipedia article on “Immune tolerance in pregnancy” with interesting info, though it’s often hard to view external references because of paywalls that show only abstracts or less. Anyhow they talk about the view that the fetus and placenta ”...may be viewed as unusually successful allografts, since they genetically differ from the mother.” The main article on “Pregnancy” at Wiki makes reference to a study of graft-versus-host reactions in pregnant mice.

Unfortunately Google searches for scholarly articles on the topic bring up many results behind high ($33 for 1-day access to an article?) paywalls. If you’re lucky you get an abstract. Here’s a freebie from 1982:“These results support the concept of pregnancy-associated suppression of cell-mediated immunity.”

I found an out-of-date medical textbook from 1999 titled Chestnut’s Obstetric Anesthesia (definitely not the Kindle edition). In a 25-page chapter on “physiologic changes of pregnancy” there are only a couple of paragraphs about the immune system. Of interest to our discussion

Polymorphonuclear leukocyte function is impaired during pregnancy, as shown by depressed neutrophil chemotaxis and adherence.113 This may account for the increased incidence of infection during pregnancy and the decreased incidence of symptoms in some pregnant women with autoimmune diseases (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis). However, pregnancy does not appear to be associated with suppression of auto-antibody production.114 Although the serum concentrations of immuno-globulins A, G, and M are unchanged during gestation, humoral antibody titers to certain viruses (e.g., herpes simplex, measles, influenza A) are decreased.115

No doubt much has been learned about this since 1999.

uh, sorry for some redundancy in my posting. Must fire my copy-editor…