If your brain is affected by lupus, you may experience headaches, dizziness, behavior changes, vision problems, and even strokes or seizures. Many people with lupus experience memory problems and may have difficulty expressing their thoughts.
Lupus and the central nervous system
Symptoms include: Confusion and trouble concentrating (sometimes called lupus brain fog) Seizures (sudden, unusual movements or behavior) Stroke (blocked blood flow in the brain that causes brain cells to die)
People with lupus can have cognitive symptoms, like having a hard time thinking clearly or remembering things. This is also called “brain fog” or “lupus fog,” and it often comes and goes over time. In some people, lupus fog can be present for many years.
People living with lupus may experience various types of headaches for different reasons. Some of these may include: Migraine: This is a type of moderate to severe headache that may feel like a throbbing pain on one side of the head.
The most common type of headaches seen in lupus patients are migraine headaches and tension headaches. It is also not uncommon for people who have lupus to have headaches as a result of fibromyalgia (around 1-in-5 people with lupus will have this as an overlapping condition).
In general, a brain MRI will show more lesions with MS ("black holes and bright spots") but sometimes the brain lesions found with lupus or MS can be indistinguishable.
Lupus headache is an important item in the Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Disease Activity Index (SLEDAI), a scoring system often used in lupus research. The SLEDAI describes lupus headache as a "severe, persistent headache; may be migrainous, but must be nonresponsive to narcotic analgesia".
Inflammation: Any time your body is experiencing excess inflammation, such as during a lupus flare, you will feel more tired. Anemia: Anemia occurs when your red blood cell count gets low. This means that the amount of oxygen going to your organs will decrease, which can increase your level of fatigue.
Many people described the pain of lupus as similar to having the flu. This means having chills and bone-weary aches throughout your entire body. The pain can be numbing and leave you feeling drained of all energy. “I explain it to others as feeling like the flu: achy joints, muscles, bones.”
The term 'lupus fog' is used by many people with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). On patient fora and websites, confusion, difficulty planning, loss of concentration, difficulty in articulating thoughts, and memory impairment are symptoms described in the context of this fog.
NPSLE is often a serious manifestation of lupus. The symptoms of NPSLE can be highly variable, ranging from mild non-specific symptoms such as headaches, “brain fog” and mild mood disorders, to rare and severe presentations.
Neurological complications from lupus can include: Headache. Mild cognitive dysfunction. Damage to the peripheral nerves that carry signals between the brain and spinal cord and to the rest of the body.
A true lupus headache usually requires corticosteroids for treatment. Non-lupus migraine headaches should be treated with a migraine prevention diet.
The general symptoms include: fever, malaise, arthralgias, myalgias, headache, and loss of appetite and weight. Nonspecific fatigue, fever, arthralgia, and weight changes are the most common symptoms in new cases or recurrent active SLE flares.
Lupus symptoms can also be unclear, can come and go, and can change. On average, it takes nearly six years for people with lupus to be diagnosed, from the time they first notice their lupus symptoms.
Lupus is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease with a wide range of clinical presentations resulting from its effect on multiple organ systems. There are four main types of lupus: neonatal, discoid, drug-induced, and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), the type that affects the majority of patients.
A 2018 review considered several case reports of people with both conditions. The researchers noted that this is a rare occurrence. Sometimes, lupus can cause the body to attack the nervous system. This can create symptoms similar to those of MS, and it may lead to a misdiagnosis.
What Is Multiple Sclerosis? Similar to lupus, multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory disease. However, instead of causing inflammation across several body systems, MS targets one: the central nervous system (CNS).
Antibody blood tests
The test you will hear about most is called the antinuclear antibodies test (the ANA test). 97% of people with lupus will test positive for ANA. ANA connect or bind to the nucleus or command center of the cell.