Anti-acetylcholine receptor antibodies.
Angela Vincent,J. Newsom Davis +1 more
TLDR
Analysis of clinical, immunological and HLA antigen characteristics in MG suggest that more than one mechanism may underlie the breakdown in tolerance to AChR, leading to the production of anti-AChR antibodies.Abstract:
Early suggestions that a humoral factor might be implicated in the disorder of neuromuscular transmission in myasthenia gravis have been confirmed by the detection of anti-AChR antibody in 85-90% of the patients with generalised disease and in 75% of cases with restricted ocular myasthenia. Plasma exchange reveals that serum anti-AChR usually has an inverse relationship to muscle strength and present evidence indicates that patients responding to thymectomy and immunosuppressive durg treatment usually show a consistent decline in serum anti-AChR titres. The antibody is heterogeneous and can lead to a loss of muscle AChR by several mechanisms. Anti-AChR is produced in the thymus in relatively small amounts. Anti-AChR antibody synthesis by thymic lymphocytes and pokeweed stimulated peripheral lymphocytes in culture provides a means of studying the effect of different lymphocyte populations in vitro. Analysis of clinical, immunological and HLA antigen characteristics in MG suggest that more than one mechanism may underlie the breakdown in tolerance to AChR, leading to the production of anti-AChR antibodies.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Functional Activities of Autoantibodies to Acetylcholine Receptors and the Clinical Severity of Myasthenia Gravis
TL;DR: The functional ability of antibodies to decrease the number of available acetylcholine receptors by these two mechanisms is clinically relevant in the pathogenesis of myasthenia gravis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Long-term corticosteroid treatment of myasthenia gravis: Report of 116 patients
TL;DR: One hundred sixteen patients with myasthenia gravis were treated with prednisone, 6o to 80 mg daily, until the onset of improvement, followed by lower‐dose alternate‐day therapy of several years' duration, and increasing age correlated with a favorable outcome.
Journal ArticleDOI
Myasthenia gravis and myasthenic syndromes
TL;DR: The clinical classification of MG has been refined, the role of the thymus gland in the disease has been further clarified, and new information has become available on transient neonatal MG.
Journal ArticleDOI
Myasthenia gravis: Long‐term correlation of binding and bungarotoxin blocking antibodies against acetylcholine receptors with changes in disease severity
U. A. Besinger,Klaus V. Toyka,Martina Hömberg,Kurt Heininger,Reinhard Hohlfeld,Achmad Fateh-Moghadam +5 more
TL;DR: Patients with myasthenia gravis were examined prospectively by measuring serial titers of antibodies against human acetylcholine receptor, and these were correlated with a quantitative clinical score, suggesting that the autoimmune B-cell clones that formed these classes of antibodies may have been activated asynchronously.
Journal ArticleDOI
Clinical correlations of antibodies that bind, block, or modulate human acetylcholine receptors in myasthenia gravis.
TL;DR: In patients with suspected MG who lack serological evidence of anti-AChR antibodies, motor endplate biopsy is required for microelectrophysiological, immunochemical, and ultrastructural studies to establish with certainty whether or not the condition is acquired MG.
References
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Antibody to acetylcholine receptor in myasthenia gravis Prevalence, clinical correlates, and diagnostic value
TL;DR: Assay of antireceptor antibody should prove a useful test in the diagnosis of myasthenia gravis, and presence or titer of antibody did not appear to correlate with age, sex, steroid therapy, or duration of symptoms.
Journal ArticleDOI
Myasthenia Gravis: A New Hypothesis:
TL;DR: The Calabar bean is asked to be thrownaway, or at least to keep its active constituent, physostigmine, out of sight, for I believe that this magic bean, or its synthetic competitors may have blurred the authors' vision of the true nature of myasthenia gravis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Clinical, pathological, HLA antigen and immunological evidence for disease heterogeneity in myasthenia gravis.
Journal Article
Isolation of neurotoxins from the venom of bungarus multicinctus and their modes of neuromuscular blocking action.
C C Chang,C Y Lee +1 more
Journal ArticleDOI
Acetylcholine Receptors in Muscle Fibres
Ricardo Miledi,L. T. Potter +1 more
TL;DR: There are calculated to be approximately 109 acetylcholine receptors in a frog muscle fibre, which has important implications for theories concerning the nerve to muscle transmission mechanism.