Scleroderma “Personalized” Classification

Scleroderma has been studied for decades through an assessment of skin fibrosis. For this study, lead author and PhD candidate Karen Patterson and Flinders University colleagues took a different approach, looking at the autoantibodies profile of scleroderma patients and their established clinical associations.

The team was able to distinguish five major autoantibody clusters (depending on the presence and combinations of autoantibodies), and to establish an association between these clusters and specific clinical and serological parameters in the patient cohort analyzed.

Professor Peter Robert-Thomson, former clinical director for the SA Pathology Immunology Directorate, and chairman, Quality Assurance Program in Immunology (RCPA), believes this work is a step forward in the hunt for an efficient scleroderma biomarker.

Read more on this study here: http://bit.ly/1R9l7f4