Trigger for autoimmune disease identified

Newly identified cells help explain why women experience autoimmune disease more often than men, a team reports in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Several autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and multiple sclerosis affect women two to 10 times as often as men. Overall, about 80% of autoimmune patients are women. There is no cure for autoimmune disease.

But now researchers have identified a trigger for autoimmune diseases, work can begin to develop a therapeutic target to prevent and treat it.

“Our findings confirm that age-associated B Cells (ABCs) drive autoimmune disease,” says Dr Kira Rubtsova who is involved in the research. “We demonstrated that the transcription factor T-bet inside B cells causes ABCs to develop. When we deleted T-bet inside B cells, mice prone to develop autoimmune disease remained healthy. We believe the same process occurs in humans with autoimmune disease, more often in elderly women.”

Click here to read the original research.

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