Reduced proportions of natural killer T cells are present in the relatives of lupus patients and are associated with autoimmunity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Systemic lupus erythematosus is a genetically complex disease. Currently, the precise allelic polymorphisms associated with this condition remain largely unidentified. In part this reflects the fact that multiple genes, each having a relatively minor effect, act in concert to produce disease. Given this complexity, analysis of subclinical phenotypes may aid in the identification of susceptibility alleles. Here, we used flow cytometry to investigate whether some of the immune abnormalities that are seen in the peripheral blood lymphocyte population of lupus patients are seen in their first-degree relatives. METHODS: Peripheral blood mononuclear cells were isolated from the subjects, stained with fluorochrome-conjugated monoclonal antibodies to identify various cellular subsets, and analyzed by flow cytometry. RESULTS: We found reduced proportions of natural killer (NK)T cells among 367 first-degree relatives of lupus patients as compared with 102 control individuals. There were also slightly increased proportions of memory B and T cells, suggesting increased chronic low-grade activation of the immune system in first-degree relatives. However, only the deficiency of NKT cells was associated with a positive anti-nuclear antibody test and clinical autoimmune disease in family members. There was a significant association between mean parental, sibling, and proband values for the proportion of NKT cells, suggesting that this is a heritable trait. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that analysis of cellular phenotypes may enhance the ability to detect subclinical lupus and that genetically determined altered immunoregulation by NKT cells predisposes first-degree relatives of lupus patients to the development of autoimmunity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".