AIH Autoimmune Hepatitis
This is the definitive guide to help patients with the liver disease autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) beat the condition. AIH should be a completely treatable disease, but too often patients get sub-standard care and ineffective treatment, With the information in this book you can make sure you are getting the best possible treatment, and find out what you can do to help yourself. Written by one of the world's leading experts on AIH, this book explains all aspects of the condition, including why people get it, to how it is diagnosed in the clinic, how it is treated and how you can beat the symptoms.
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Amazon rating 5 star.
This guide can be read as a thorough explanation; a textbook for patients. Alternatively, with "two-minute versions" for each of the chapters, you get can all the key facts quickly. The book also has a dictionary of AIH which will help you understand the technical terms and medical jargon that you may encounter. The book is also ideal for the relatives and partners of AIH patients to help them better understand their loved one's medical problems. It will also be really useful for students, doctors, nurses and other professionals who are encountering AIH for the first time and want to find out more.
AIH Autoimmune Hepatitis
Professor Jones has been managing adult autoimmune liver disease for nearly 30 years now and in one of the largest clinical services in the world, at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. For many years the focus of the clinic was on primary biliary cholangitis (PBC, previously known as primary biliary cirrhosis) which is a close relative of autoimmune hepatitis (AIH). His great interest was always in the way PBC impacts upon the lives of patients. The symptoms and their impact on quality of life (in particular the fatigue that bedevils so many patients). The frustration that many patients feel at the challenge of getting access to up to date treatment in a disease often under-estimated by the general medical community (the more so at a time when treatment options are developing rapidly).
Over the years, he started to see more and more patients with autoimmune hepatitis. Patients with real and ongoing problems. Two things started to become clear; things which have led ultimately to writing a book, AIH The Definitive Guide for Patients with Autoimmune Hepatitis. The first was the growing realisation that, despite the reputation amongst hepatologists of being the “treatable liver disease”, AIH treatment in practice wasn’t nearly as effective, or uniformly used, as it should have been. There was a disconnect between the perception and the reality. The second was the sense that the level of awareness in the clinical community about AIH and its impact on patients, and the accompanying tools and resources to help patients and clinicians, were much lower than was the case for PBC. This is despite the potential for AIH to be a much more aggressive and problematic disease.
One of his missions has been to help patients and their families understand the disease and the way that it affects them better. A thing that has always surprised him was the lack of an easily accessible book explaining the disease aimed at patients and families that he could recommend in the clinic. After a working lifetime of talking about the disease in ways that people (hopefully) understand he always intended to write that book. His first book (“PBC; The Definitive Guide for Patients with Primary Biliary Cholangitis) was published in 2020 and the feedback he got from patients was fantastic. It suggested that the book was a real help and filled a long-standing gap. The success of this book, and his ongoing sense of the need for better information to increase awareness about AIH, led him to write a companion volume for AIH.
When the manuscript for the PBC Definitive Guide was half-completed the world changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the PBC and AIH patient communities did not appear to be particularly disproportionately impacted (other than when people had end-stage cirrhosis), there was a more subtle consequence. The needs of the emergency clinical service meant that even the best clinical services struggled to deliver the same level of care as before to their PBC and AIH patients. The need for patients to be in control of their own destiny, to be able to understand and manage their disease themselves as much as possible, became clear. This made the need for books like these more pressing than ever.