Antimitochondrial antibodies in patients with chronic graft-versus-host disease

Chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) and primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) have many clinical and laboratory features in common. These include scleroderma or lupus erythematosus-like skin lesions, a Sjögren-like sicca syndrome, cholestatic liver disease and a variety of serological autoimmune phenomena. Furthermore, liver histology in both diseases is characterized by lymphocytic infiltration of the portal fields and destruction of small bile ducts. We investigated whether there were also parallels between both diseases in incidence and characteristics of antimitochondrial (AMA) and other autoantibodies. Sera from patients with cGVHD (n = 11, group 1) were examined by immunofluorescence (IFL) and immunoblot (IBL), and the results were compared with sera from patients without cGVHD (n = 21, group 2) and after autologous BMT (n = 16, group 3). In group 1 AMA was detected by IFL in one and by IBL in nine of 11 (81%) patients. Group 2 and 3 patients were AMA-negative by IFL and AMA positive by IBL in statistically lower incidence of 19% and 6% (p less than 0.001), respectively. cGVHD-associated AMA recognized a spectrum of mitochondrial proteins, the most frequent being molecules of 63/60 kD and 22 kD. Follow-up studies showed a temporal correlation between the emergence of AMA and the clinical occurrence of cGVHD. We conclude that patients with cGVHD have a high incidence of AMA similar to patients with PBC, but the reaction pattern of AMA differs between the diseases. The presence of AMA in cGVHD further emphasizes the concept that both diseases may have a related pathogenetic background.