Stress increases the risk for rheumatism...

Lars Alfredsson.

Yes, stress can cause different sorts of rheumatism, not only rheumatoid, but also for instance polymyalgia rheumatica, which a person near to me maybe has. A person probably suffering from longterm stress, and with a history of child abuse of different kinds. Abuse that is denied, or in parts recognized but considered having no real significance for this person's life, from that person herself, and probably many around her.

Thought of blogging about something I thought was interesting, from a Swedish site called Suntliv.nu. I want to start with relating to the content in the article:

Low control at work increases the risk for rheumatoid arthritis. A new Swedish study shows that the one who doesn’t decide over her/his work situation runs the risk of getting rheumatoid arthritis. It’s an endemic disease with over 50,000 people stricken by it in Sweden (with a population of 9 million people). Women are more often stricken than men.

“We have found clear connections between the disease and works where you can’t control your situation,”

the Swedish professor Lars Alfredsson says.

Other factors for getting ill are smoking and low education.

The researchers have also found some unexpected connections, namely between stress at work and rheumatoid arthritis.

The ones with low space for (own) decisions have a 60 % higher risk of being stricken.

The researchers also classified people in different professions after how low respective high control they have and compared people in professions with low control with people with high control concerning the risk of getting ill.

In that investigation they showed that it is 30 % higher risk for people in professions with low control to get ill.

Stress causes inflammation they mean and think it’s possible that stress makes inflammation come up.

Studies abroad has shown that the ones stricken with rheumatoid arthritis often have had a period of stress or experienced something revolutionary before the debut of the disease.

The researchers have also asked the participants about different sorts of stress and are now analyzing the connections between stress, results which are going to become presented later.

The study is also about interplay between inheritance and milieu.

My loud thinking around this article: I read this article after I had blogged about the young woman Veronika with rheumatoid arthritis whose psychiatrists didn’t believe her when she said she had been raped, and who showed to have been sexually abused as a child too.

I also came to think of two men I know of who got rheumatism as adults, one after a divorce in middle age and the other when he had passed 75 I think. The latter also got heart problems at the same time. I wonder over the latter and the relation he lives in and possible stress in that relation, a relation that easily could make you feel a little out of control?

The latter man was spanked as a child I think. Something he doesn’t seem to really question or view as wrong, or really rebel against. Something that was natural then and "what all parents did” because they "didn’t know better"?

I think I have read somewhere about connections between spanking and rheumatism too.

Thinking loudly, and trying to put something in words I am not really capable of putting in words yet. Being in a relation or maybe situation feeling a low control could also be a feeling that is fooling a person... Because he or she can actually have the power to leave it in may cases. But is feeling stuck and power and helpless, maybe even feels paralyzed (as the child ones was). Early feelings that are triggered in the present and feels so real so the person doesn’t see any alternatives, truly doesn’t see them. But those feelings stemming from early events in this persons life aren’t just to control. As we think we can. And are nothing to moralize over...