A Little History on this Not-So-New Condition

Though the medical term lupus dates back to the late 1400s, Hans von Gersdorf is thought to be the first medical writer to associate the word to what we today consider the disease lupus.

Earlier on, the term was more descriptive and used to note skin eruptions on various parts of the body. It’s likely that many ulcers of unexplained origin were dubbed lupus during the middle ages. It’s also quite possible that various skin cancers were thought to be or were called lupus.

The term lupus comes from Latin and is translated as “wolf.” Since early medicine involved primarily noting what could be seen with the naked eye, doctors (and lay people) probably felt that the skin involvement often seen in cases where patients were suffering from discoid lupus looked like wolf bites.

Though discoid lupus (involvement of the facial skin) continues to present with rather unappealing disk-like sores and though many patients with lupus have malar rashes (butterfly shaped sunburn looking facial patterns) the discoid condition is a skin problem and rarely looks like any sort of animal bite except in extreme cases. Only 10% of those diagnosed with lupus are discoid sufferers. The bulk of lupus diagnosed patients suffer from the systemic condition.

During the 1950s, medical researchers began to look at and more systematically study the conditions dubbed lupus. In 1971, a committee of North American rheumatologists drafted out a criteria lists which was modified slightly in 1982 and is the standard for diagnosis in most countries today.

The list of criteria as published by the American Rheumatism Association includes the following markers which may (or may not) indicate lupus are as follows:

1. Malar Rash
2. Discoid Rash
3. Photosensitivity
4. Oral Ulcers
5. Arthritis
6. Serositis
7. Renal disorder
8. Neurologic disorder
9. Hematological disorder
10. Immunologic disorder
11. Positive fluorescent antinuclear antibody (FANA) or ANA test result

If a patient presents with 4 or more of these problems, then most doctors will seriously consider lupus as the problem. Still, lupus is an elusive disease and one that is hard to pinpoint.