07/28/2024
✨ My experience living with chronic illness is slowly shaping my life, my art, my thoughts, and fundamentally shaping my way of seeing everything around me. Be healthy, love yourself, don’t wait to do what you want. Life is happening now.
Ankylosing spondylitis is an invisible disability, an inflammatory rheumatism that most often affects the spine, pelvis and sacrum, characterizing a form of the so-called “axial” disease. The so-called “peripheral” form affects joints other than the spine. Ankylosing spondylitis can also affect the areas where tendons and muscles attach to the bones, including the Achilles tendon, but also other organs such as the eye, heart and intestines. Ankylosing spondylitis is strongly associated with the presence of the HLA B27 marker. Ankylosing spondylitis is not rheumatoid arthritis. In addition, ankylosing spondylitis stiffens and deforms the joints, especially the spine. The patient feels a stiffening of the column and the joints, and a more or less long period of “unrusting” of the body is necessary for the patient in the morning in order to be able to move again. Inflammation of the spine can, as in the case of the sacroiliac joint, progress to ankylosis. Ankylosis is an ossification of joint damage that welds the different bone pieces forming the joint. This ankylosis causes significant loss of mobility and functional impairment. One of the risks for the patient is that ankylosis resulting from bone formation develops in an abnormal posture of the spine. At present, there is no curative treatment and the pathophysiological mechanisms remain unknown.
Ankylosing spondylitis is a disease that progresses through inflammatory flare-ups during which the inflammation is particularly strong, spaced out by so-called remission periods during which the patient can lead a normal life.
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