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Retrospective Study
©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jan 7, 2015; 21(1): 283-291
Published online Jan 7, 2015. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v21.i1.283
Autoantibodies in Chinese patients with chronic hepatitis B: Prevalence and clinical associations
Bo-An Li, Jia Liu, Jun Hou, Jie Tang, Jian Zhang, Jun Xu, Yong-Ji Song, Ai-Xia Liu, Jing Zhao, Jing-Xia Guo, Lin Chen, Han Wang, Li-Hua Yang, Jie Lu, Yuan-Li Mao
Bo-An Li, Jia Liu, Jun Hou, Jian Zhang, Jun Xu, Yong-Ji Song, Ai-Xia Liu, Jing Zhao, Jing-Xia Guo, Lin Chen, Han Wang, Li-Hua Yang, Yuan-Li Mao, Center of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, 302 Military Hospital of China, Beijing 100039, China
Jie Tang, Jie Lu, EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostics (China) Co., Ltd., Beijing 100101, China
Author contributions: Mao YL designed the research; Li BA, Liu J and Hou J contributed equally to this work in collecting samples, performing the experiments, and data acquisition and analysis; Zhang J and Xu J refined the experiments and clinical data collection; Li BA and Tang J wrote the paper; Song YJ, Liu AX, Zhao J, Guo JX, Chen L, Wang H, Yang LH and Lu J contributed to manuscript review and critical revisions.
Correspondence to: Yuan-Li Mao, Professor, Center of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, 302 Military Hospital of China, 100 W 4th Ring Middle Rd, Beijing 100039, China. maoyuanli2013@163.com
Telephone: +86-10-63879628 Fax: +86-10-63879628
Received: March 27, 2014
Peer-review started: March 27, 2014
First decision: May 29, 2014
Revised: July 2, 2014
Accepted: August 13, 2014
Article in press: August 28, 2014
Published online: January 7, 2015
Processing time: 286 Days and 0.3 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: We investigated the prevalence of autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) and primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC)-related autoantibodies and their associations with clinical features in Chinese patients with chronic hepatitis B. Interestingly, and unexpectedly, we demonstrated that anti-nuclear antibodies (ANA), especially ANA-H, were significantly negatively associated with cirrhosis. Another interesting finding was that the prevalence of anti-promyelocytic leukemia protein antibodies was significantly different between hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) (0%) and non-HCC patients (12.5%). In terms of analytic methods, for the first time we used an unequivocal dichotomy to cluster the autoantibodies into AIH and PBC profiles to delineate the bias of autoantibody expression for each case. The data showed that the PBC profile was strongly associated with cirrhosis.