Autoimmune Diseases Service

The Autoimmune Diseases Service offers excellent specialized medical care and carries out teaching, research and dissemination tasks in the field of systemic autoimmune diseases. It also coordinates with other services that deal with organ-specific autoimmune diseases.

Autoimmune diseases are a group of conditions of unknown cause in which the immune system is altered and attacks organs in the body itself. Currently, more than 110 such diseases are known and some epidemiological studies estimate that more than 10% of the population has some autoimmune disease.

In a third of these diseases there is a widespread attack on the whole body; these are known as systemic autoimmune diseases. They are made evident by a simultaneous or successive involvement of most organs and systems and have several autoantibodies as biological markers.