Slow bacterial infections or autoimmunity?

Dept of Medical Microbiology, University College and Middlesex School of Medicine, London, UK.

In this article, Graham Rook and John Stanford propose that a group of idiopathic diseases that are often associated with a degree of autoimmunity and arthritis, including rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, sarcoidosis and psoriasis, are caused by extremely slow-growing bacteria. They suggest that these diseases are one end of a continuous spectrum caused by related slow-growing genera, which ranges from rheumatoid arthritis, through Takayasu's arteritis and Whipple's disease, to reach the conventional mycobacterioses such as tuberculosis and leprosy.

PMID: 1642753 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]