Muscle and Thymus Antibodies in Myasthenia gravis

Patients with Myasthenia Gravis and Thymoma Have Anti-Skeletal Muscle and Anti-Acetylcholine Receptor Antibodies Simultaneously

“…Anti-AChR antibodies are the principal agents in the pathogenesis of MG [1][2][3][4][5]20]. However, recent studies indicate that muscle components other than the AChR may also be involved in the autoimmune process of MG. Myasthenic patients with thymoma are known to have serum antibodies directed against skeletal muscle components which can be detected by various techniques such as IF [9-12, 21, 22], complement fixation [23], antiglobulin consumption [24,25], indirect haemagglutination [18,26,27], immunodiffusion [28][29][30], and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay [15,31,32]. In these above assay systems, the tissue extracts widely used include citric acid extract [33], PBS extract [15,18,32], and hypertonic sucrose extract [34] from human, monkey, or rat muscle.…”

Determinação imunohistoquímica da presença de células mióides em pacientes submetidos à timectomia

“…Estudos do mecanismo auto-imune da placa motora e sua relação com a patogênese da miastenia grave, serviram de base para os trabalhos que investigaram as células primordiais tímicas de humanos e animais [5][6][7][8] . As células mióides foram reconhecidas e sugeridas como prováveis elementos que reagiriam com anticorpos antimúsculo 9,10 .…”