What is an "autoimmune disease"?

What is an "autoimmune disease"?

Anne Peters, MD, FACP, CDE (Professor and Director of Clinical Diabetes Programs, USC Keck School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: Is it possible to prevent type 1 diabetes?; Is it possible to prevent type 2 diabetes?; What environmental factors contribute to diabetes? and more...

An autoimmune disease means the body makes a mistake. It looks at some normal tissue and says, "That's a foreign invader." So, in the case of diabetes, the body looks at all its cells and says, "There's something wrong here," and tries to kill off the eyelet cells by an autoimmune response, making antibodies. In the case of rheumatoid arthritis the body looks at joint tissue and says, "That's not normal," and the autoimmune response is that the body tries to kill it off. And so an autoimmune disease is really a mistake by the immune system, and that mistake creates a disease.