Sepúlveda, Nuno; Malato, João; Sotzny, Franziska; Grabowska, Anna D; Fonseca, André; Cordeiro, Clara; Graça, Luís; Biecek, Przemyslaw; Behrends, Uta; Mautner, Josef; +3 more... Westermeier, Francisco; Lacerda, Eliana M; Scheibenbogen, Carmen; (2022) Revisiting IgG Antibody Reactivity to Epstein-Barr Virus in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Its Potential Application to Disease Diagnosis. Frontiers in Medicine, 9. 921101-. ISSN 2296-858X DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2022.921101
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Abstract
Infections by the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) are often at the disease onset of patients suffering from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). However, serological analyses of these infections remain inconclusive when comparing patients with healthy controls (HCs). In particular, it is unclear if certain EBV-derived antigens eliciting antibody responses have a biomarker potential for disease diagnosis. With this purpose, we re-analyzed a previously published microarray data on the IgG antibody responses against 3,054 EBV-related antigens in 92 patients with ME/CFS and 50 HCs. This re-analysis consisted of constructing different regression models for binary outcomes with the ability to classify patients and HCs. In these models, we tested for a possible interaction of different antibodies with age and gender. When analyzing the whole data set, there were no antibody responses that could distinguish patients from healthy controls. A similar finding was obtained when comparing patients with non-infectious or unknown disease trigger with healthy controls. However, when data analysis was restricted to the comparison between HCs and patients with a putative infection at their disease onset, we could identify stronger antibody responses against two candidate antigens (EBNA4_0529 and EBNA6_0070). Using antibody responses to these two antigens together with age and gender, the final classification model had an estimated sensitivity and specificity of 0.833 and 0.720, respectively. This reliable case-control discrimination suggested the use of the antibody levels related to these candidate viral epitopes as biomarkers for disease diagnosis in this subgroup of patients. To confirm this finding, a follow-up study will be conducted in a separate cohort of patients.
Item Type | Article |
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Faculty and Department | Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases > Dept of Clinical Research |
PubMed ID | 35814774 |
Elements ID | 181368 |
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