When something unexpected happens it's a natural reaction to think about the cause. For medical conditions establishing cause is often part of the diagnostic process. However there are many illnesses for which there is no obvious cause. Put another way it's hard to find a common link between people which might either explain the cause or at least predict who is more likely to be affected. So far with CLIPPERS there hasn't been an identified cause or common link, just a description of symptoms, findings and treatment response. However that hasn't stopped many suggestions being put forward (by others) for why I probably have CLIPPERS. So just for the record here they are.
- Deficient diet (from not eating meat).
- Too much alcohol.
- Too little alcohol.
- Exercising too hard.
- Brain-strain from thinking too much at work.
- Too many MRI brain scans over the years.
- Stress related to threatened redundancy in 2010
(how I wish this one was possible to prove). - Bad genes.
- Because it's just typical of me to have something awkward ;-)
I suspect none of the above will turn out to be a trigger for CLIPPERS but you never know. In addition it's very rare to find a single trigger for an illness. More likely are a combination of risk factors or associations. For example, what if people who eat a particular chocolate are 10% more likely to get a particular illness than those who don't? If I happen to eat the chocolate regularly and get the illness I still can't establish cause and effect because most likely I'm still just unlucky.
For CLIPPERS there are no obvious risk factors or associations that I can see with the possible exception of a finding in a small number of patients by Kastrup et al. They found a raised Immunoglobulin-E (IGE) level in two out of three patients - IGE is involved in allergy and immune responses - but it's too early to know whether this is associated with CLIPPERS risk or not. Hopefully before too long a mechanism for the damage done by CLIPPERS will be found which will lead to a diagnostic test and may offer some clues as to the underlying cause. Until then I'll be filing CLIPPERS under "Just One of Those Things".
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
