Revisiting IgG antibody reactivity to epstein-barr virus in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Its potential application to disease diagnosis

• Autor(a) principal: Sepúlveda, Nuno
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Malato, João, Sotzny, Franziska, Grabowska, Anna D., Fonseca, André, Cordeiro, Clara, Graça, Luís, Biecek, Przemyslaw, Behrends, Uta, Mautner, Josef, Westermeier, Francisco, Lacerda, Eliana M., Scheibenbogen, Carmen
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/18649
• topic: Epstein-Barr virus; Myalgic encephalomyelitis; Chronic fatigue syndrome; Antigen mimicry; Biomarker discovery; Patient stratification

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.