Brain Advance Access originally published online on September 17, 2008
Brain 2008 131(10):2536-2537; doi:10.1093/brain/awn221
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Scientific Commentary |
Stiff, twitchy or wobbly—are GAD antibodies pathogenic?
Department of Clinical Neurology
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Correspondence to: E-mail: angela.vincent@imm.ox.ac.uk
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Over the last decade or so there has been increasing recognition of the importance of measuring antibodies to neuronal proteins in the diagnosis and management of disease. Such antibodies can be classified into two main groups. First, there are those that are markers for a disease process, such as the paraneoplastic antibodies against Hu, Yo, Ma2, but which are not thought to cause the disease. This is because their targets are cytoplasmic or nuclear proteins that are not exposed on the surface of the neurons, and because the patients do not respond to immunotherapies such as plasma exchange, intravenous immunoglobulins or corticosteroids. Moreover, the antibodies do not necessarily associate with specific