Addison's Disease Health Video

Video Transcript

JUSTIN C.K. DAVIS, M.D.: Hi. I'm Dr. Justin Davis and today I am going to discuss Addison's disease with you. Addison's disease also known as adrenal insufficiency was first named by Thomas Addison and that's how it got its name. Addison's disease is a very rare disorder so most of you will never experience Addison's disease and probably won't even know anyone else that has it. When you have Addison's disease however it's a very serious problem because the adrenal glands which produce many very important hormones for the body stop working. The adrenal glands are two small glands. There's one on each side of your body just located on the top of the kidneys, and these have again various hormonal functions producing many different hormones which control many parts of your body, so as you can imagine when something goes wrong with this, you can have many different kinds of symptoms. Some of the most common causes of having Addison's disease or adrenal insufficiency are these days an autoimmune disease. Autoimmune disease means when your body stops functioning as it should and sometimes even attacks itself. Other cause is to have your adrenal glands fail and develop Addison's disease are infectious causes for example, while it's not very common in the United States anymore, tuberculosis at one time and still in some underdeveloped countries, it's a very large cause for Addison's disease. Certain cancers also cause Addison's disease, lung cancer being known as one of the primary causes. When you develop Addison's disease some of the symptoms that you may experience could be weight loss, fatigue, severe fatigue, coloration changes in your skin particularly a darkening of the pigment, craving for things like salt, fluids, many different kinds of symptoms because again the hormone produced by the adrenal glands vary so much and have many very important functions. The treatment for Addison's disease really depends upon the underlying cause. So, the first important thing when your doctor diagnoses you as having Addison's disease is to try to determine what's causing the problem and treat that. So, for example, if it's autoimmune, doing something to slow down that autoimmune process or if it's an infection, doing something to cure the infection. The other part of treatment is to try to rebalance whatever hormones have gone awry. So, for example if somebody has a lack of certain kinds of salt productions which would be why they might be craving salt, then to replace those salts which will thereby at least temporarily make them better until the underlying cause can be fixed. Well, Addison's disease again is very rare so not many people will ever experience it and it's very difficult to truly prevent it because there are so many underlying causes. So, truly there's not much you can do to really prevent it except to maintain a healthy lifestyle and make sure that anything that seems to go wrong in your body that you're not sure about, to tell a physician or some other health professional rather than ignoring it. The one thing that I might caution everyone is that again because such a wide array of symptoms are possible with Addison's disease everyone, one time or another, will experience some of these. Who hasn't been tired of fatigued at times or lost or gained a little weight or felt excessively thirsty. So, if you're experiencing a few of these don't panic but if you have all of these together at once for a prolonged time that's when, still don't panic, but let your doctor or another health professional know.