There are so many neurological and autoimmune illnesses suddenly, and they are still generally overlooked despite growing prevalence. Something must connect them all.

-You’ve named one: the autism spectrum. If anyone knew the cause, then it would be much less of a mystery.

-My sister got pregnant about 15 years ago, and she lost weight throughout the pregnancy and developed a Lupus-like rash. The doctor said she was healthy despite severe illness. She delivered the baby still born at 7 months, and since then she has miscarried over 10 times and has had an undiagnosable autoimmune illness with fluctuating symptoms. She was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, but that only explains some of her symptoms. Every doctor she has seen—OB, endocrinologists et al—have told her she should be able to carry a baby to term and to keep trying. She gets so sick every time she gets pregnant that she gave up.

-My mom has been sick for several years for unknown reasons, with diarrhea her primary symptom. She died last month, one month after turning 66. She was in the OCU for a month prior. She had been previously misdiagnosed with a C diff supeebug infection; this time, docs never determined the specific cause (Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, they say—autoimmune illnesses), but it killed her. She is the only women we know of in her family who didn’t live into her 80s and didn’t die from stroke-related complications.

-I was progressively ill for years in my late 20s/early 30s, with serious neurological and joint problems, as well as episodes of Alzheimer’s-like memory loss and disorientation, hearing and vision loss, partial paralysis. Neurologists thought it must be MS or ALS, and then ruled those out and basically said it’s anxiety and to live with it. More doctors—over a dozen—later and ultimately I was diagnosed with three tickborne diseases. Two years of antibiotics later and most of my neuro and cognitive problems are totally gone; however, I have a lot of other issues and I was diagnosed more recently with mast cell activation syndrome, which is basically an autoimmune allergic disorder. The treatment is with high doses of allergy medications, and that has worked wonders. Evidence now shows that Lyme or other infections from ticks can trigger an autoimmune cascade disorder, which is then a lifelong disease even after the infection itself is cured.

-Thanks in part to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, people think Lyme is an imagined disease, but infections from ticks are real and spreading and for unknown reasons they make many people’s bodies go totally haywire. And not only infections; there’s also a bizarre autoimmune condition people are suddenly getting in response to tick saliva that makes them deathly allergic to red meat. Author John Grisham almost died from it before he was diagnosed. It sounds too bizarre to be real but it is real.

-Neuroscientists are finding that a lot of diseases that cause dementia-like symptoms and mental illnesses, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lyme, and even schizophrenia, coincide with inflammation of brain tissue and that reducing inflammation causes symptoms to remit. They’ve also strongly associated amyloid proteins with Alzheimer’s, although some research shows that the proteins may be related but not necessarily cause Alzheimer’s as previously thought.

-No one really knows definitively about any of these emerging diseases, but a common link in many cases is inflammation, particularly inflammation of the brain and nerve fibers that can cause demyelination. The causes could be many: infections (tick bites, syphilis), environmental hazards, foods tainted with neurotoxins like Roundup, and yes, potentially even some vaccines, which could as foreign agents in the body trigger an autoimmune cascade disease that becomes self-perpetuating. Unfortunately, there’s a political crusade against considering or even acknowledging some associations, and when politics makes it so that science can’t even consider investigating causes, then all it will do is investigate treatments.