Complex autoantibody repertoires in patients with glaucoma

[摘要] Purpose: Glaucoma is one of the leading causes for blindness in theworld. It is characterized by a progressive loss of retinal ganglioncells. An elevated intraocular pressure cannot explain the disease inall subjects. Autoimmune mechanisms maybe involvemed in the pathogenesisof the disease. The aim of our study was to analyze the IgG autoantibodyrepertoires in sera of glaucomatous subjects against optic nerveantigens.Methods: Nintey-four subjects were included in this comparativecross-sectional study of healthy (CTRL), primary-open-angle-glaucoma(POAG), ocular-hypertension (OHT), and normal-tension-glaucoma (NTG)volunteers. Sera of subjects were tested against western blots of opticnerve antigens. For each western blot, a densitograph was built bydigital image analysis and subsequently a multivariate analysis ofdiscriminance was performed.Results: Complex IgG autoantibody repertoires could be found in allsubjects, even in healthy subjects. The multivariate analysis ofdiscriminance can test for statistical differences between the groupsusing the whole complex staining pattern for the calculation. Asignificant difference between all groups against optic nerve antigenswas found. The NTG group had the highest variance from controls (p<0.01).Conclusions: This study demonstrates immunological effects in POAGand NTG and may provide further evidence for an involvement ofautoantibodies in the pathogenesis of both NTG and POAG. Using thetechniques presented in this study, the differences in the complexautoantibody repertoires were assessed by means of statistical analysis.Further studies are needed to determine whether these changes inautoantibodies could be helpful in the diagnosis of glaucoma.

[学科分类] 生物化学/生物物理