This book offers information and advice on this common autoimmune disease. Lupus is an auto-immune disease in which a person's immune system becomes over-active and attacks the body, causing damage and dysfunction and sometimes affecting major body organs. Lupus may be mild or present with more serious, life-threatening complications. Lupus is more common in women between 15 and 40, and 90 per cent of sufferers are women. Symptoms include extreme fatigue, joint pain, muscle aches, anaemia, and general malaise. It may be confused with other disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis. Because of such difficulties with diagnosis, it probably affects more than the 30,000 people in the UK known to have lupus, and the 1.5 million in the US. Drug treatments and awareness of the condition have improved greatly in recent years.