Autoantibodies against aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase: novel diagnostic marker for type 1 diabetes mellitus

Abstract

Objectives: To investigate whether or not antiaminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aaRS) autoantibodies could be detected in patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM) and be used as a diagnostic marker for type 1 DM, autoantibodies against aaRSs were measured in the plasma of normal subjects, patients with type 1 DM and patients with type 2 DM.

Methods: An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was performed to detect anti-aaRS autoantibodies in the plasma of normal subjects, and patients with type 1 DM, and patients with type 2 DM.

Results: From the 65 (normal), 58 (type 1 DM) and 57 (type 2 DM) subjects, anti-aaRS autoantibodies were found in 37.9% of patients with type 1 DM compared with 1.54% of the non-diabetic controls, and 5.26% of the patients with type 2 DM (p <0.0001). In addition, anti-aaRS autoantibodies were identified in 30% of patients with type 1 DM without classical type 1 DM autoantibodies.

Conclusion: Anti-aaRS autoantibodies were identified in 37.9% of patients with type 1 DM. The results of this study demonstrate for the first time that autoantibodies against aaRSs are specifically associated with type 1 DM.

Keywords::

• Pancreas
• autoantibody
• antisynthetase syndrome
• autoimmune disease
• ELISA

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant No 04-2008-053 from the SNUH research fund, and a grant (CHAIACF-2009-NS13) from the CHA University, and a grant from the Korea Health 21 R & D Project, Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affair, Republic of Korea (00-PJ3-PG6-GN07-001), and the grants of National Research Foundation (NRF-2008-359-C00024), 21C Frontier Functional Proteomics Project from Korean Ministry of Science and Technology (FPR08-B1-250), the WCU Project of the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (R31-2008-000-10103-0) and Gyonggi-do.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.