Dear editor
Thanks for the concerns and comments of Mr. Zuowei Duan. There were indeed some limitations in our published article since it was only a preliminary exploratory research. As for the rarity of LGI1 encephalitis, only sixteen patients were enrolled in our study. The multifactorial analysis of variance was hard to be evaluated. But we do believe the statistical significance of our finding about the increasing of CXCL13 levels in the patients.
We agree that the clinical significance of CXCL13 levels increasing should not be over-estimated by clinicians. We have stated that the increasing of CXCL13 levels were reported in other autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, neuroborreliosis and anti-NMDAR encephalitis in “Discussion Section” of our published article. The specificity and sensitivity of CXCL13 in serum/CSF for autoimmune encephalitis still need to be further investigated. Anyhow, we have found a potential biomarker for the diagnosis of anti-LGI1 encephalitis.
Disclosure
The authors report no conflicts of interest in this communication.