Viral antibody titers, immunogenetic markers, and their interrelations in multiple sclerosis patients and controls

Our purpose was to investigate possible interrelations between antibody titers against seven viruses (measles, rubella, herpes simplex, mumps, varicella-zoster, coronavirus, cytomegalovirus), HLA-class II antigens, and immunoglobulin Gm allotypes in multiple sclerosis (MS). We studied 57 MS patients and 59 controls with similar age and sex distributions. In MS patients, we found the classical increased frequency of HLA-DR2, HLA-DQw1 and also an excess of Gm (3; +/- 23; 5*). Mumps antibody levels were higher in MS patients than in controls; elevation was not significant for measles antibodies. Analysis suggests that an association between HLA-DQw1 and antibody titers against various viruses exists in controls but is absent in MS patients. In particular, we found that mumps antibody titers were higher in DQw1-positive than in DQw1-negative controls, while there was no significant difference among MS cases. Accordingly, we found that the overall difference between patients and controls was due to the fact that DQw1-positive patients had higher titers than controls, while DQw1-negative cases had similar titers as controls. These findings suggest that biological and molecular characteristics of DQw1 might differ in MS patients.