PLoS ONE (Jan 2016)

Clinical Features of Idiopathic Interstitial Pneumonia with Systemic Sclerosis-Related Autoantibody in Comparison with Interstitial Pneumonia with Systemic Sclerosis.

  • Hideaki Yamakawa,
  • Eri Hagiwara,
  • Hideya Kitamura,
  • Yumie Yamanaka,
  • Satoshi Ikeda,
  • Akimasa Sekine,
  • Tomohisa Baba,
  • Shinichiro Iso,
  • Koji Okudela,
  • Tae Iwasawa,
  • Tamiko Takemura,
  • Kazuyoshi Kuwano,
  • Takashi Ogura

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0161908
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 8
p. e0161908

Abstract

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Patients with idiopathic interstitial pneumonias sometimes have a few features of connective tissue disease (CTD) and yet do not fulfil the diagnostic criteria for any specific CTD.This study was conducted to elucidate the characteristics, prognosis, and disease behavior in patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD) associated with systemic sclerosis (SSc)-related autoantibodies.We retrospectively analyzed medical records of 72 ILD patients: 40 patients with SSc (SSc-ILD) and 32 patients with SSc-related autoantibody-positive ILD but not with CTD (ScAb-ILD), indicating lung-dominant CTD with SSc-related autoantibody.Patients with SSc-ILD were predominantly females and non-smokers, and most had nonspecific interstitial pneumonia confirmed by high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) and pathological analysis. However, about half of the patients with ScAb-ILD were male and current or ex-smokers. On HRCT analysis, honeycombing was more predominant in patients with ScAb-ILD than with SSc-ILD. Pathological analysis showed the severity of vascular intimal or medial thickening in the SSc-ILD patients to be significantly higher than that in the ScAb-ILD patients. Survival curves showed that the patients with ScAb-ILD had a significantly poorer outcome than those with SSc-ILD.Data from this study suggest that lung-dominant CTD with SSc-related autoantibody is a different disease entity from SSc-ILD.