Scientific Reports (Jul 2017)

Anti-centromere antibody exhibits specific distribution levels among anti-nuclear antibodies and may characterize a distinct subset in rheumatoid arthritis

  • Nobuo Kuramoto,
  • Koichiro Ohmura,
  • Katsunori Ikari,
  • Koichiro Yano,
  • Moritoshi Furu,
  • Noriyuki Yamakawa,
  • Motomu Hashimoto,
  • Hiromu Ito,
  • Takao Fujii,
  • Kosaku Murakami,
  • Ran Nakashima,
  • Yoshitaka Imura,
  • Naoichiro Yukawa,
  • Hajime Yoshifuji,
  • Atsuo Taniguchi,
  • Shigeki Momohara,
  • Hisashi Yamanaka,
  • Fumihiko Matsuda,
  • Tsuneyo Mimori,
  • Chikashi Terao

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-07137-4
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

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Abstract Anti-centromere antibody (ACA) is one of the classical anti-nuclear antibody (ANA) staining patterns. However, characteristics of ACA in comparison with the other ANA patterns and clinical features of ACA-positive subjects have not been elucidated. Here, we examined all ANA patterns by indirect immunofluorescence for 859 rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. Together with the ANA data of 9,575 healthy volunteers, we compared distributions of the ANA levels. ACA was the only ANA that demonstrated a definite bimodal distribution of levels. ACA showed significantly higher levels than the other ANA staining patterns in both RA and healthy population (p < 0.0001). ACA-positivity was associated with old age and was observed more in females. We further recruited another cohort of 3,353 RA patients and confirmed the findings. ACA was also associated with Raynaud’s phenomenon (p = 6.8 × 10−11) in RA. As a conclusion, ACA displays a specific ANA staining pattern with a bimodal distribution, and ACA-positive RA may constitute a distinct subset with specific clinical features.