Autoantibodies Appear Long Before Lupus Symptoms

A study has found that long before symptoms appear, patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus) already have autoantibodies in their blood.

Researchers compared blood samples from lupus patients to samples from people who never developed lupus. While testing early samples from both groups, they found that the lupus patients had the autoantibodies in their blood for months to years before symptoms of the disease appeared. Some of the autoantibodies, such as antinuclear antibody, had been present longer than others. The lupus autoantibodies tended to accumulate in the blood in a predictable pattern up until diagnosis.

The early detection of autoantibodies may help doctors recognize those who will develop the disease and allow monitoring before they would otherwise be noticed. People with lupus may have many different symptoms, of which the most common are extreme fatigue, swollen joints, unexplained fever, skin rashes, and kidney problems. Many more women than men have the disease, and it is more common in women of Hispanic, Asian, and Native American descent.

"We don't know whether the virtual halt in the accumulation of new autoantibodies is a result of therapy now typically used or whether the relative stability in the autoantibodies found after diagnosis is a feature of the natural history of lupus,” said senior author John Harley, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Oklahoma (Norman, USA).




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