okay here’s the thing:We don’t know what exactly causes vitiligo. That is, we know that
okay here’s the thing:We don’t know what exactly causes vitiligo. That is, we know that it happens because the body destroys the pigment making cells in the body (melanocytes). It likes being comorbid with other instances of autoimmune fuckery, like Hashimotos because having one auto-immune thing means you’re more likely to have another one. That can happen for…well, any reason. The immune system likes to freak out about random shit. Stress is one of them! That does NOT mean that ‘trauma causes vitiligo’ anymore than ‘stress causes lupus’ as much as ‘people predisposed towards certain immune diseases can experience flares or initial onset of the thing from things that upset the immune system. It can be just stress. It can be trauma, sure. But saying that ‘trauma causes vitiligo’ is VASTLY reductive of the complex relationship between stress and the immune system and its various impacts on the rest of us. (also, fun fact: sometimes people with vitiligo experience spontaneous repigmentation when the body stops being an ass to its own melanocytes.)Now what really, REALLY gets me is the line about piebaldism. Because that? That’s straight up wrong. We know the inheritance pattern (autosomal dominant, for one, a c-kit mutation on chromosome 4 (here). We have in fact actively selected for in various animals because it occurs naturally in virtually all mammals. It occurs in chimps! It’s just part of the natural variation of pigmentation that happens, into the direction of ‘spot of no pigmentation’. It has nothing, NOTHING what-so-ever to do with trauma of the mother, unless you’d like to claim that every single piebald-patterend animal out there has had a traumatized mum, and that for the last who-fucking-knows generations back since we started actively breeding for it. So like, yes absolutely do your research. But like…maybe if you’re doing it, make sure your research is actually y’know TRUE. Instead of claiming that a genetic mutation is ‘Trauma from the mother’. -- source link