Early Lupus Symptoms - First Symptoms of SLE

What is lupus?
Lupus also known as SLE or Systemic Lupus Erythematosus is an auto-immune rheumatic disease that can affect all the systems of the body. The disease affects women more often than men and children.

Lupus Disease
The early symptoms of lupus are mild enough to brush aside as they do not affect your daily life. However the collective discomfort caused by these meek signs is worth considering until you find a convincing cause for it.

Types of Lupus
Discoid Lupus, Systemic Lupus and Drug-induced lupus are the different types of lupus and they affect the skin, multiple body organs or both respectively. When a drug causes the symptoms, they are totally reversible.

Early symptoms of SLE

• Fatigue
• Malaise
• Sudden weight loss or gain
• Hair loss
• Easy bruising
• Facial Rash: It maybe the first symptoms of SLE and also persistent, unlike the rest of the signs that tend to flare up and subside. It ranges from mild blush to scaling and itching.
• Photosensitivity – The sun-exposed parts of the face and neck develop redness or rashes. Skin sensitive to UVA-UVB sun rays as well as the UV rays from bulbs and lamps.
• Blue, red or white coloration at the finger tips on exposure to cold climate or cold water.Such type of Raynaud’s phenomenon is also seen at other sites like tip of nose, ears and feet.

Additional symptoms affecting the various organs

• Fever
• Mouth ulcers
• Joint pain and swelling
• Stiffness in joints and muscle pain
• Butterfly skin rash on the cheeks and nose
• Chest pain or breathing difficulty
• Neurological symptoms like confusion and epileptic attack
• Depression
• Signs of kidney disease
• Blood clotting tendency
• Miscarriages
• Low platelet count
• Anemia

SLE imitates many other illnesses that need to be ruled out. The absence of positive laboratory results in early phase of lupus makes it all the more difficult to diagnose. Once diagnosed a treatment regimen needs to be meticulously followed under strict supervision to make the disease self-limiting. The fatality caused by lupus has significantly decreased in the last 25 years mainly due to diagnosis of disease in the early stages, effective laboratory facilities and drug research.

The prognosis has greatly increased with recent advances in the field of medicine, and some patients can go into remission. Also one needs to keep a watch on the signs of relapse as SLE tends to show flare ups just like arthritis.