Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Causes
By Mayo Clinic staffThe cause of Wegener's granulomatosis is unknown, but it appears to develop as a result of an initial inflammation-causing event that triggers an abnormal reaction from your immune system. The combination of these events can lead to inflamed, constricted blood vessels and harmful inflammatory tissue masses (granulomas).
Scientists speculate that the initial event may be an infection. This has been documented in nearly half the people with Wegener's, but the infections aren't overwhelming. Other possible contributing causes include an environmental toxin, a genetic predisposition to the condition or even a combination of all of these. This question has yet to be resolved.
