Lung Involvement !!

[Chris]

Just curious if anybody has had lung involvement with thier RA symptoms. I have recently had shortness of breath and ribcage pain on breathing. I have had this before and it ussually goes away in a few days to a week. I had asthma as a kid and always had seasonal allergy problems with tightness in the chest and difficulty breathing but I think this is RA related. Maybe this could be dry pleurisy as I went to the Doctors yesterday and he listened to my lungs and did a lung x-ray that looked good. Any advice or info would help.

 

Chris

[linda]

Rib pain can happen with PA, since the inflammation involves muscles, tendons and even bones. Pleurisy can occur with PA as well. I've had both occur. Since we have joints where our ribs attach to the sternum and spine, we can get inflammation in those joints as well.

RA can and does affect organs as well as joints. Thank goodness your xray was clear, but that doesn't help with your pain, does it? Try heating pads, they might help (but no longer than 20 min as a rule). Btw, I also had asthma as a child, and altho I have not been able to be on abx long enough to help with the PA, I did see a complete resolution of resp. symptoms that had begun to reoccur as an adult. My first try with AP lasted about 8 months, with zithromax and mepron. When I started I was using a rescue inhaler at night. After about 6 months I was cleaning and found my inhaler under my nightstand, and I remembered then that I had not used it for several weeks. It had happened so gradually that I had not even realised it. That was 2.5 years ago, and I have had absolutely no resp. symptoms since.

If you had asthma, did you ever had lung infections, pneumonia? If you did then it stands to reason that you would have mycoplasma colonies in your lungs. If the abx are affecting them, you might be experiencing a herx which is causing the lung/rib pain. What do we do when we get bronchitis or pneumonia? Drink lots of fluid and try to clear the lungs of mucus. I used to drink hot jello as a child to dilate the lungs, any hot drink would help and maybe even feel good.

It might be a good idea to start keeping a written account of your symptoms, such as how often you're short of breath and what brings it on, and also the level of pain in your ribs. As I said, my progress was so slow that I was almost unaware of it. Maybe this is a good sign, as long as it doesn't go on for too long and doesn't get so bad that you're breathing is compromised. Many people with childhood asthma have it recur as an adult, you may be preventing that from happening, as I feel I did.

Sorry for the length of this, but I also wanted to tell you that one of the members here, Joe M, I think, has a child that had asthma, and I think (my fibrofog is really bad, so I apologise if I'm wrong about this), he treated the child with abx and the symptoms went away. Hope I'm remembering this correctly.

[Maz]

[user=11]linda[/user] wrote:

My first try with AP lasted about 8 months, with zithromax and mepron. When I started I was using a rescue inhaler at night. After about 6 months I was cleaning and found my inhaler under my nightstand, and I remembered then that I had not used it for several weeks. It had happened so gradually that I had not even realised it. That was 2.5 years ago, and I have had absolutely no resp. symptoms since.

 

Hi Linda,

Zith and Mepron are both treatments for babesia, which causes air hunger and rib cage pain (costochonditis). Could it be that your symptoms resolved when undiagnosed babesia was treated?

Peace, Maz

[Maz]

[user=1567]Chris[/user] wrote:

Maybe this could be dry pleurisy as I went to the Doctors yesterday and he listened to my lungs and did a lung x-ray that looked good. Any advice or info would help.

Chris, good job acting on this and getting the necessary tests to rule things out.

While it's important to rule out all possibilities, like pleurisy, it just strikes me that all of your recently mentioned symptoms (neck pain, weight loss, air hunger, sleeplessness, neck pain, etc) are all so Lyme-like. I'm just a fellow patient, but have you pursued Lyme and coinfections as possible offenders in your mix?

Babesia will cause air hunger and costochonditis-like pain….as well as other problems like anemia (it's a red blood cell protozoan parasite), anxiety, recurrent fevers, night and day sweats, chills, some neurological issues, etc. Here are a couple links with more info about babesisosis, but important to remember that some or all symptoms may apply, as every patient is unique in presentation:

http://www.anapsid.org/lyme/symptoms/tbi-symptoms.html

http://www.lymeinfo.net/coinfections.html

[font=”Arial, Verdana, sans-serif”][font=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”](Babesiosis)[/font]
Babesia is a protozoan spread by ticks, blood transfusion, and in utero. Despite there being 13 known forms to date, current testing only looks for two of them.[/font][/size]

[font=”Arial, Verdana, sans-serif”]Air hunger
Cough
Fatigue
Fevers
Headache
Hemolysis
Imbalance without true vertigo
Mild encephalopathy
Shaking chills
Sweats”
[/font]

Peace, Maz

 

[linda]

I'm sure of it, Maz. This was with the AP doc in Scottsdale, AZ, who tested me twice for all kinds of bugs. He always promised to show me the slides with the bacteria, but never did, and always hemmed and hawed about the test results. I don't think he ever found actual bacteria, but that doesn't surprise me, having been sick for so long and knowing how difficult they are to find in blood. But he was a big believer in treating babesia, borrelia and mycos.

Sadly, he failed to tell me that I should be taking probiotics, and I didn't find out until 8 months after starting abx when I found this site. I'd had tummy trubbles already, but that was when they became impossible to ignore; I had to stop not only the abx but also the mobic and reduce the pred, that led to this flare which has not gone away. It's tough not to be po'd, because I believe had I been on probiotics I could've stayed on the abx and would be in a completely different place in my health right now. But what are you going to do?

I believe I have several different bugs because of all the times I had pneumonia as a child (15 documented), and also the tick bite that I had when I was 10 y/o. Also, the multiple diadnoses of PA and FM. It really messed up my chances of being able to attack all of these bugs when my stomach was damaged. It was a really depressing blow when Dr. K wouldn't rx IV abx. But I have an appt with Dr. Wonderful Tues, who is determined to get me off this pred once and for all, and hopefully the mobic as well. Wouldn't it be ironic if a rheumy ends up being the doctor who helps me heal my gut and gets me back on AP? If I ever get back to that point, I think I deserve some kind of award, Most Tortuous Roadback or something.;)

[Joe M]

[user=11]linda[/user] wrote:

Sorry for the length of this, but I also wanted to tell you that one of the members here, Joe M, I think, has a child that had asthma, and I think (my fibrofog is really bad, so I apologise if I'm wrong about this), he treated the child with abx and the symptoms went away. Hope I'm remembering this correctly.

hi Linda,

No, we are lucky, our daughters do not have asthma, although I do.  I have never tried treating it with ABX, as it is a mild case and allergy driven  (cats, dust, pollen, etc). 

Best wishes
Joe

[linda]

Joe,

Hmmm, who am I think of? Was it John McDonald? Oh well, glad your daughters are not afflicted with asthma!

[Tiff]

Yes, I think it was John McDonald's daughter, Linda.

[linda]

Thanks Tiff, I thought for a while that I really had crossed over to CrazyTown!

Good day for Texas college football! Sorry if you're from Nebraska or OK.

[jasonjuul]

Hi:

  I would ask your doctor to order Pulmonary Function Tests (PFTs). My daughter has to have them every three months or so to make sure her MCTD isn't affecting her lungs.

Best of luck,
JM

[Maz]

John, how is Rachel doing? Did you manage to get her to Dr E in Sept?

Peace, Maz

[Michele]

Chris,

I have intense rib cage pain. Sometimes I feel like I'm not processing air correctly. It's not “asthmatic” per se; it feels stuffed up. Sometimes “air hunger” describes the sensation but not always.

When I was on plaquenil I also had air starvation. (Four weeks ago a doc checked me for babesia and it did not show up on blood tests.) Prednisone made the air hunger worse and did not make my “RA” feel better.

Did you ever have pneumonia or bronchitis in your health history? I do; with a history of Beta Lactam antibiotics to recover from these acute infections.

I've had PFT's and x-rays with nothing showing up except for a lung granuloma that the pulmonary doc wasn't concerned about at all. I think the pain has to be inflammation of the connective tissue between the ribs and maybe the lining of the lungs. My layperson's intuitive idea is that this is ground zero for my c. pneumonia mycoplasm. And that DID show up in my lab tests four weeks ago.

According to conventional RA descriptions the disease can affect every major organ of the body along with joints. It sure seems like an infection to me. My CD 57 shows a high degree of infection. Thus, I plug away with an abx protocol.

If you ever get an answer to this, please post because it has been a question I've asked before on this board too. It does appear to be rare.

Michele

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