Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Arumugakani, Gururaj
• Vital, Edward M
• Md Yusof, Md Yuzaiful
• McGonagle, Dennis G
• Emery, Paul

Titel

Response to: ‘Which B-cell subset should we target in lupus?’ by Ferraccioli and Houssiau

Ist Teil von

• Annals of the rheumatic diseases, 2014-04, Vol.73 (4), p.e20-e20

Ort / Verlag

England: BMJ Publishing Group LTD

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

BMJ Journals Archiv - DFG Nationallizenzen

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Rituximab therapy profoundly depletes B cells, but does not directly affect long-lived PCs-demonstrated by the maintenance of total IgG including antimicrobial antibodies. 4 5 Evidence of clinical efficacy of B cell depletion in human SLE is controversial with contradictory RCTs 6 7 and open label studies. 8 However, there is abundant evidence that anti-dsDNA titre falls after rituximab. 4-7 We have previously shown that reduction in anti-dsDNA was only observed in patients with complete depletion of both B cells and plasmablasts. 5 We also found that clinical relapse following rituximab was strongly associated with plasmablast repopulation. 5 Collectively, the effects of B cell depletion therapy in SLE suggest that autoantibodies are secreted by shorter-lived antibody-secreting cells compared to those that maintain steady state antimicrobial immunoglobulin levels.