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Biological therapies improved significantly the prognosis of autoimmune diseases. However, there are patients who do not reach the expected therapeutic response. One of the causes of non-responsiveness is the presence of anti-drug antibodies(ADA). Immunogenicity of biological therapies can be induced by different factors, many of them still unknown. We consider associated disease modifying anti rheumatic drugs (DMARD), dose escaladation and increased frequency of administration, as strategies that can decrease imunogenicity. It should be kept in mind that each biological therapy has a different pharmacokinetic mechanism, variable risk of developing ADA and that a standardized method for detecting serum active substance and ADA would be useful for monitoring biological treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To reassess the antiovarian antibodies test performance in the diagnosis of premature ovarian failure of the patients with autoimmune thyroid disease. Material and method: The study involved 70 patients with autoimmune thyroid disease, from which ten cases (10/70, 14.4%) were associated with premature ovarian failure and were found to have serum antiovarian antibodies, using as reagent a mixture of ovarian proteins; the values greater than 10 IU/mL were considered positive. Results: Antiovarian antibodies were positive in one case (1,4%, 1/70) and was not a case of premature ovarian failure; in the same case antinuclear antibodies were positive. Conclusions: Determination of the circulating antiovarian antibodies as a possible predictive factor for premature ovarian failure is not really sustained, especially because it doesn't exist a recognized specific marker of the ovarian autoimmunity, and the study results are statistically insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cytomegalic virus (CMV) isn't considered an infectious agent relied to the etiology of the rheumatoid polyarthritis (PR), but it has the property to modulate the immune response. The aim of this case-control study was to investigate the prevalence of the infection with CMV in PR and to correlate IgG anti-CMV titres with the TNF-alfa and IL-6 values. There is no prevalence of the CMV infection over the PR patients more than over the arthrosic ones or the general population. The number of patients with very high IgG anti-CMV titres (>10 × N) was visibly higher in the PR group than in the A group, meaning that a reactivation of the viral infection had taken place to the PR patients. The semnificative correlation between the TNF-α, IL-6 values and the IgG anti CMV titres cannot sustain a pathogenic role of these antibodies in PR, but their important growth at the PR patients in a moderate or intense state of illness may have a pathogenic relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIg) are highly purified gammaglobulin preparations made from pooled human plasma from 3,000 to 10,000 healthy blood donors. IVIg generally contains more than 95% unmodified IgG. The clinical utility of IVIg has been enlarged during the last years from the primary immunodefi ciency syndromes to a wide variety of clinical conditions, such as infectious processes (i.e., sepsis, parvovirus B19, or HIV infection), neuroimmunological diseases (i.e.: multiple sclerosis, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, or myasthenia gravis, and in different systemic autoimmune diseases (i.e., dermatomyositis, polymyositis, systemic lupus erythematosus, ANCA vasculitis, Sjogren syndrome, systemic sclerosis, Henoch-Schonlein purpura, Behcet's disease, antiphospholipid syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, etc). The mechanism of action of IVIg is complex and may differ between diseases and even between patients. IVIg is usually well tolerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]