Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
Autoantibody to NA14 is an independent marker primarily for Sjögren's syndrome
Nuclear Autoantigen of 14 kDa (NA14) was originally identified using the serum of a Sjögren's syndrome (SS) patient as probe in screening a human testis cDNA expression library. To date there is no report in the systematic analysis of the prevalence of autoantibodies to NA14. In this study, anti-NA14 was determined in several rheumatic diseases from independent cohorts in the US and Japan. The prevalence of anti-NA14 were 18/132 (13.6%) in primary SS, 0/50 (0%) secondary SS, 2/100 (2%) SLE, 1/43 (2.3%) scleroderma, 0/54 (0%) rheumatoid arthritis, 1/29 (3.4%) polymyositis/dermatomyositis, and 0/58 (0%) normal healthy controls. The frequencies of anti-NA14 positive sera in primary SS are statistically greater than normal healthy controls (p=0.006), secondary SS (p=0.044), and other rheumatic diseases. Furthermore, among 11 anti-NA14 positive primary SS sera, 4/11 (36.3%) sera were negative for both anti-SS-A/Ro and SS-B/La antibodies. Thus anti-NA14 autoantibodies may be useful for the discrimination of primary versus secondary SS and serve as a diagnostic marker for primary SS especially in seronegative (anti-SS-A/Ro and anti-SS-B/La antibodies negative) patients with SS.