A Novel Approach to Discriminate Subgroups in Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of central nervous system. Since different types of immune cells are involved in MS pathogenesis, in this study we aimed to evaluate serum levels of several immunological components including soluble CD4 (sCD4), sCD8, sCD163, and immunoglobulins as markers of activity of T-cells, macrophages, and B-cells in different types of MS. Serum levels of sCD4, sCD8, and sCD163 of patients with relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS, n=61), primary progressive MS (PRMS, n=31), secondary progressive MS (SPMS, n=31), clinical isolated syndrome (CIS, n=31) and neuromyelitis optica (NMO, n=31), and healthy controls (n=49) were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Serum levels of Ig-G, Ig-M, and Ig-A were determined using nephelometric technique. Serum levels of sCD4, sCD8, sCD163, Ig-G, Ig-M, and Ig-A were significantly different in five groups of cases (p<0.05). Furthermore, application of stepwise method of discriminant analysis yielded 4 significant discriminant functions of classification due to the presence of six levels of categorical variables in the analysis. The most important function explained 85.5% of the total variance with the correlation value of 0.79. Taken together, our preliminary analysis suggests that although we found some functions to discriminate most of the patients, further studies will be required to individuate immunological markers characterizing the different type of MS including RRMS, PPMS, SPMS, CIS and NMO as proved by the data on sCD4, sCD163, Ig-M, and Ig-G in blood.