Question:
Does anyone have any information on this disease? I am looking to get into contact with dog owners who have experienced this disease and share their knowledge with me.

Answer:
I got the following from VetInfo.com




Immune mediated just means that the immune system is involved in producing the clinical symptoms. I think that it can be said fairly that almost all vets use this term to indicate inappropriate immune responses since the immune system is involved in most disease situations. So, in its general use the term "immune mediated" in front of the description of an illness, such as immune mediated synovitis or immune mediated hemolytic anemia, means that the immune system is inappropriately causing a a disease process.

Immune mediated arthritis occurs when the immune system causes an inflammatory response in a joint. It is painful. Sometimes terribly painful. It includes a number of possible underlying causes, including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, drug reactions (sulfa antibiotics in particular), immune reactions to systemic diseases or subclinical joint infection and unexplained instances of immune mediated inflammation. Sometimes, immune mediated arthritis occurs and the response is "sort of" appropriate. An example would be Lyme disease. The immune system may be doing its best to attack the problem but causing a secondary problem in the joints at the same time. This can happen with several infectious agents.

Most of the immune mediated arthritis diseases are treated with corticosteroids or other immunosuppressive medications. As you can well imagine, suppressing the immune system if an infectious agent is present is not a very good idea so it is important to differentiate between septic arthritis and immune mediated non-septic arthritis prior to initiating treatment with immunosuppressive medications if possible. This can be difficult to do and sometimes it is just necessary to treat with antibiotics while awaiting joint culture results and to try to judge the response. At some point it generally becomes apparent that antibiotic therapy is not the answer and that immune mediated disease is appropriate to treat for, either through testing for diseases like lupus, rheumatorid factor testing, through repeated joint fluid evaluation or response to therapy.

The hardest question to answer is whether or not these conditions are treatable. The answer depends on the cause. Immune mediated arthritis due to Lyme disease may respond to continued antibiotic therapy and pain relief medications. We have several patients with unexplained immune mediated arthritis conditions that have responded very well to corticosteroids. Rheumatoid arthritis is extremely difficult to treat successfully long term but can sometimes be managed. In my experience arthritis associated with systemic lupus erythematosus is not very responsive to treatment -- but this is based on limited experience.

Mike Richards, DVM


Answer: