
Stopping Smoking
7 reasons for not smoking when you have axial SpA (AS)
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Discover whether your diet can have an impact on your axial SpA (AS)
This information is for anyone with axial spondyloarthritis (axial SpA) including people with ankylosing spondylitis (AS)
It is important you don’t become overweight as this increases the burden on weight-bearing joints and can increase pain.
When you are walking, the hips, knees and ankles bear three to five times your total body weight. So, for every pound you weigh, 3 to 5 pounds of extra weight is added to each knee when you walk. If you are overweight and lose 10 pounds in weight, 30 to 50 pounds of extra stress would be removed from the joints.
For a healthy balance diet consider eating:
Trying to make sense of nutrition and your condition can sometimes be difficult. You may find it helpful to talk your dietary needs through with a nutritionist. You can ask your GP or Rheumatologist to refer you or you can consult a nutritionist privately. You can find a private nutritionist in your area at the Nutritionist Resource website.
You should be suspicious of any diet that claims to treat or cure axial SpA (AS). If such a diet existed, GPs and rheumatologists would know about it and would be recommending it to you. If you are tempted to try a diet, do discuss your plan with your GP or rheumatology team to help ensure that trying the diet will not cause you health problems.
Before trying any diet think whether it:
This diet is based on research by Professor Alan Ebringer. His work is based on the theory that some types of klebsiella bacteria in the gut of people with axial SpA (AS) are involved in triggering the disease process via a complex immune response. In 1996, in a paper supporting his theory, Professor Ebringer published the chart of one of the patients that he had been following over a period of time. The patient’s erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) showed a clear decline over the time he had followed the diet (1983-1995). ESR is a measure of inflammation in the blood and Professor Ebringer believes that the lowering of the patient’s ESR demonstrated the success of this diet.
However, it is recognised that ESR levels in AS are not necessarily indicative of a person’s actual symptoms. Some people with high ESR can experience little pain and stiffness, whereas people with low ESR might conversely be in a lot of pain and be very stiff.
Some people with AS have told us they have had a good experience with the low starch diet whereas others have found no benefit.
It is difficult to research into diet. When new medicines are tested the researchers might give one group the new medicine and another group a dummy or placebo medicine. Even the doctors treating the patients in the medical trial might not be told which patients are taking the trial medicine and which the dummy medicine so that this knowledge does not influence the results. This is known as a double blind trial. We know from research that double blind trials, in which neither the patient, nor the observer knows which treatment has been given, is the best way to show if a treatment actually works.
However, when researchers experiment with diet and try to look at how diet can influence disease, it is impossible to carry out certain research protocols such as using controls or dummy treatments. Neither the person eating the diet nor the person taking measurements after the diet can be blinded as to which diet has been used. It’s also not possible to confirm that someone is sticking rigidly to the diet without any lapses.
For this reason NASS can neither give its sanction nor refute the hypothesis that the low starch diet will help patients with AS. It remains a hotly debated subject among doctors.
7 reasons for not smoking when you have axial SpA (AS)
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