This is very interesting! I have always pin pointed the start of my PsA to after the birth of my first child........I wasn't diagnosed with PsA then but tenosynovitis in both ankles and wrists. The consultant I saw after symptoms got worse after the birth of my second child told me that autoimmune problems often show up in women after the birth of children. So could this be a factor?
I came to nursing late, but was a homecarer for social services for 10 years before I started my career in the Dialysis Unit....our patients come in for treatment however ill they feel, sore throats among the patients and staff are routine.
We nurses tend to eat our young, we do the same thing with those who chronically ill. Maybe we need more support as we are afraid to mention it to our supervisors. We aren’t allowed to be sick, it messes up the staffing and it is preferable from managements point of view for us to just show up, no matter how would we feel. As long as you have a pulse, you are expected to show up. This is even more true with hospital nurses.
The physical and emotional stress, like Lamb said it has to play a factor in the higher population of nurses showing up here. We certainly don’t get much support from our fellow nursing staff or managers.
I’m not a nurse but I was exposed to a lot of dangerous toxins before the age of 7. We lived on base where the “bug truck” drove around daily spewing clouds of DDT…all us kids used to run behind the truck. Also, I was exposed to agents orange green and purple as a result of govt tests on our base…which we found out about decades later. There was compensation for the soldier and spouses but not dependants. A lot of us kids have autoimmune issues now.
I’m with Lamb – I agree that physical and mental stress play a huge role in the development of this disease. I’m a retired teacher, and, like nursing, that is very hard on the mind and the body. I’ve also wondered about germ exposure and what extreme exposure, like what nurses and teachers get, does something crazy to the immune system. I was the teacher who never sat down, and I was also the teacher who rarely was sick. (I retired with enough banked sick days for two of us to be off most of a school year! LOL) I used to think that I had a scary good immune system. But I obviously got that wrong. Scary, yes. But good … Not so much!