Causes, Symptoms, and Treatments of Ankylosing Spondylitis

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. Well, welcome back to the show. It's great to have everybody listening and I wanted to do a couple things right up front. First, I got a really great review I wanted to share with you that came in via podchaser (see link at end of notes) and you can find a link to podchaser in the shownotes. If anybody wants to read further reviews, or even leave a review and hear me read it here. But this one says; Five stars. What an incredible resource. If you're newly diagnosed, or have been struggling with as for a while, you need to listen. Jason shares easy to understand information and conversations about the real life things we deal with. It's super positive Podcast, where you feel understood and empowered. Thanks, Jason, for all you're doing in the community. Well, thank you to the author of that review. That's what this is all about. I absolutely love it.

And on a side note, I thought I'd give you all an update on training of the dog. My math is is not the best and I come to find out. He's gonna be six months old. He's not six months old now. So Bandit is doing great. We're working on the whole issue of taking a leash from me and holding on to it for a while. He doesn't necessarily like to do it, but he's food driven. So I've started to incorporate a few treats in it to get him to, you know, be more excited about actually, the process of working and, again, I have to remember he's not quite six months old yet, so he's really doing well. He sits at the door, waits for me to go through it, and then comes out. Heels pretty good. Really the biggest issue is, he's a bed hog. He'll jump up in bed with me at night and try to push me to where he wants me at in bed verse, him settling around me so we have a few challenges, so to speak, coming up with a form of who's in control. Roll it at nighttime when we go to sleep. But outside of that, he's just been a fantastic dog, extremely intelligent, really wants to work hard and please. So it's the first time I've ever had a Labradoodle first time I've ever really been around one, and they're just a fantastic dog.

So with that on to todays show. So in today's episode, I thought I would really kind of take it back to some of the basics. I'm seeing a lot of people that are newly diagnosed or have a spouse or a child with ankylosing spondylitis, coming onto the forums on Facebook and asking lots of questions. This is by no means going to cover everything. But it's really good, I think, a starting point for a lot of people and a really good possible spot to reset for many of us that have had the disease for quite a while. So I'm going to start off with basically what is Ankylosing Spondylitis or as we talked about in the last couple episodes, using the terminology, axial spondyloarthritis, to be more inclusive of the people that have non-radiographic axial spondyloarthritis versus the radiographic. Listen to the prior two episodes episodes 50 and 51 so that you get a better understanding of that terminology that's becoming much more commonplace.

So, again, Ankylosing Spondylitis, we know is a form of arthritis that primarily affects your spine. It does affect many other joints besides your spine, but the spine is where they start to look for the disease in the beginning, and that in conjunction with your sacroiliac joints, are really the two primary areas that they try to focus on. It causes severe inflammation of the vertebrae. This can cause and might eventually lead to chronic pain and disability. In advanced cases, the inflammation can cause new bone to grow along the vertebrae and other areas and this can lead to deformity or what we call bamboo spine, the hunched over look. That's what you see if you were looking at a side view of me. Ankylosing Spondylitis can also cause pain and stiffness in other parts of the bodies, your rib cage, as I said, your...