Kaleidoscopic Autoimmunity
Yehuda Shoenfeld
Unit for Study of Autoimmune Diseases and Medical Dept. B, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University
We describe an 18-year-old girl with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) who developed chronic active hepatitis following splenectomy that cured the ITP. This is a phenomenon in which an organ belonging to the immune system is resected, which results in cure of one autoimmune disease but in the emergence of another, apparently unrelated, second autoimmune disease. We refer to this phenomenon as kaleidoscopic autoimmunity, explaining that some autoimmune diseases are not induced by autoantigen-driven mechanisms, but rather result from immune dysregulation.