Few things impact your life more than a serious health issue. Today, you will learn the most interesting facts about diseases. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and infectious diseases, affect the health of millions of people and cost billions of dollars in medical expenses worldwide each year.
Lifestyle choices, such as quitting smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, and staying physically active, can help prevent some of the most common chronic diseases and some types of cancer. Regular health check-ups often help detect chronic conditions and cancer at an early stage when treatment is more likely to be successful.
Interesting Facts About Diseases
- Malaria for Treating Syphilis: Malaria was once used to treat syphilis. Dr. Wagner von Jauregg injected patients with malaria-infected blood, causing extremely high fever, which ultimately killed the disease. Jauregg received a Nobel Prize for this treatment, and it was used until the development of penicillin.
- Schizophrenia Diagnosis: Schizophrenia can be diagnosed with 98.3% accuracy using a simple eye test that tracks eye movement disorders.
- Porphyria and Vampire Legends: Porphyria is a group of diseases with symptoms that include extreme sensitivity to sunlight, protruding fangs, and peculiar behavior, believed to be the basis for vampire legends, especially since these symptoms are exacerbated by garlic.
- Reverse Anorexia: There are people who suffer from “reverse anorexia.” Due to the illness, primarily men with already muscular bodies feel too small.
- Silent Migraine: A silent migraine is a migraine that is not accompanied by pain, but people experiencing it may lose vision, see wavy lines in their visual field, and have hallucinations.
- Staghorn Kidney Stones: Kidney stones can grow until they fill all the crevices in the kidneys and resemble deer antlers; they are called staghorn stones.
- Yellow Fever and Haiti: Yellow fever reached America on slave ships. Two hundred years later, it helped end slavery in Haiti. During the Haitian Revolution, an epidemic broke out, killing two-thirds of the French army. It hardly affected any of the slaves, forcing France to surrender the island.
- Marjolin’s Ulcer: Marjolin’s ulcer is a type of cancer that grows only on scar tissue and most often results from burn injuries. It is very aggressive and deadly.
- Fatal Familial Insomnia: Fatal familial insomnia is an inherited brain disease that ultimately leads to the loss of sleep. There is no cure for it. It involves progressive worsening of insomnia, leading to hallucinations, dementia-like confusion, and eventually death.
- Acne: Acne is the eighth most common disease in the world. It was described by pharaohs more than 2,000 years ago.
- Music-Induced Epilepsy: “Musicogenic epilepsy” is a rare disease that causes seizures whenever you listen to your favorite music.
- Asthma in Olympians: Asthma is the most common chronic disease affecting Olympic athletes. 8% of them suffer from this disease.
- Tuberculosis in the Victorian Era: In the Victorian era, tuberculosis was so romanticized that fashion trends emerged emphasizing and imitating the symptoms of the disease. This fashion movement was called “consumption chic.”
- Mystery of Ulcers: Ulcers are a mystery to modern medicine; they do not know why they occur, and there is no cure for them.
- Mental Health Signs: Common signs of mental health issues include sudden mood swings, changes in eating habits, excessive anxiety or fear, trouble concentrating, and avoiding friends or social activities.
- Genetic Testing: Genetic testing can help diagnose many rare diseases, but not all. Genetic testing identifies the genetic cause in about 25-30% of cases. Even with a diagnosis, it is unlikely that there is a cure or even treatment for any specific rare disease.