Increased anti-Sm antibodies in schizophrenic patients and their families

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Abstract

Sirota, Pinkhas, Michael Firer, Klara Schield, Neomi Zurgil, Yoram Barak, Avner Elizur and Hanoch Slor: Increased Anti-Sm Antibodies in Schizophrenic Patients and their Families. Prog. Neuro-Psychopharmacol. & Biol. Psychiat. 1993, 17(5): 793–800.

  • 1.

    1. Autoantibodies in the Sm complex have become a useful serologic aid in the diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and have rarely been observed in other diseases.

  • 2.

    2. A subset of SLE patients have a variety of psychiatric abnormalities, including schizophrenia.

  • 3.

    3. The authors have recently observed that schizophrenic patients have a high incidence of autoantibodies suggesting that autoimmune phenomena may play a role in the pathogenesis of this disease.

  • 4.

    4. In the present study the authors investigated multicase families with schizo- phrenia for the presence of anti-Sm antibodies and showed that these autoanti- bodies are elevated both in patients and in their healthy relatives.

  • 5.

    5. An autoimmune process may be involved in the pathology of schizophrenia.

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      In addition, it is known that not only the patients with schizophrenia suffer from autoimmune disorders; their families also exhibit higher levels of autoimmune conditions (Wright et al., 1996). Moreover, patients with schizophrenia and their relatives have higher antinuclear antibody and anti-DNA (de-oxyribonucleic acid) antibody levels (Sirota, 1993) and pathogenic immune complexes in circulation than healthy controls (Mailian et al., 2005). To date, in relation to cytokines, only very few studies have been conducted by measuring, IFN-γ, sIL-2R and IL-6 blood levels in first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia (Arolt et al., 1997; Gaughran et al., 2002; Nunes et al., 2006).

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