Clinical significance of serum Titin antibody measurement in patients with Myasthenia gravis crisis / 中华神经医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To measure the clinical significance of serum Titin antibody measurement in patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) crisis.Methods Twenty six patients with MG crisis,30 patients with other neurologieal diseases (ONDs) and 30 health controls,collected in our hospital from July 2008 to August 2010,were chosen in our study; the sera level oftitin antibody was deetected by enzyme-linked immunosorbentassay (ELISA); correlations of titin antibody level with the clinical features and prognosis of the patients with MG crisis were analyzed.Results The positive rate of titin antibodies in MG crisis group and ONDs group was 73.1％ and 3.3％,and it was negative in health control group; significant differece was noted (x2=51.922,P=0.000).The positive rate of titin antibodies in patients older than 50 years of the MG crisis group was signifcantly higher than that in patients younger than 50 years (x2=5.052,P=0.014); the positive rate of titin antibodies in MG crisis group was negatively correlated to the gender of the patients,the types of Osserman and the pathological types (P＞0.05).The titin antibody titer after treatment was significantly decreased as compared with that before treatment (P＜0.05).Conclusion Positive titin antibody is mostly found in MG crisis and it's level is related to the severity of MG crisis,indicating that it might be beneficial for evaluating prognosis of MG patients.