[mscrzy1]

I've been doing a lot of research with the connection of autoimmune diseases, specifically lupus, and AA. When doing this, I came across this interesting little tidbit on the Johns Hopkins website...

Chemotherapy
Now lets talk about chemotherapy, the gold standard for the worst lupus. Are there other ways to give chemotherapy, so you wouldn't have to give it once a month for six months and then for two more years every three months? An oncologist at Hopkins studied a disease called aplastic anemia, where the blood counts are so low the person has to have a bone marrow transplant. He asked, for the people who survived the transplant and did very well, whose immune system did they have? The donor's or their own? It turns out all the long term survivors had their own immune system. They hadn't been cured by the bone marrow transplant. The hypothesis is they were cured by the chemotherapy given before the bone marrow transplant. The oncologist gave the chemo for four days in a row and then never again. This oncologist decided to start treating aplastic anemia with four days of chemotherapy instead of doing bone marrow transplants. In the next 10 patients treated just with chemotherapy, seven out of 10 had a complete remission. Three did die of the aplastic anemia, but no one died of the four days of chemotherapy.

I took this from http://www.hopkins-arthritis.org/arthritis-info/lupus/. I'm going to get tested for lupus. It seems to be the only cause or associated disease with raynaud's that I can't totally discount. And, I'm finding some articles and even another person who has connected their AA directly to lupus.