Plasma periaxin is a biomarker of peripheral nerve demyelination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Assessing disease progression and informing clinical trials in peripheral neuropathy would benefit from objective and responsive fluid biomarkers closely linked to disease biology. This is particularly important in chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP) and Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), the most common inflammatory neuropathies, where reliable biomarkers of peripheral demyelination would help identify, and potentially measure, active disease and responses to treatment. We postulated that periaxin, a protein exclusively expressed by myelinating Schwann cells, could serve as a fluid biomarker of demyelinating peripheral neuropathy. We developed a single molecule array (Simoa)-based immunoassay to measure plasma periaxin in patients with CIDP (n = 45, including longitudinal samples across a discovery cohort and a validation cohort, for a total of 77 time points), GBS (n = 30, 66 time points), Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT, n = 20), CNS disease controls with multiple sclerosis (n = 30) and healthy controls (n = 30). We also evaluated whether periaxin is released in myelinating co-cultures following immune-mediated demyelination and axonal damage, comparing results with uninjured cultures. Plasma periaxin effectively distinguishes peripheral from CNS diseases, with significantly elevated levels in CIDP, GBS and CMT, but not in CNS disease or healthy controls (all P < 0.01). In CIDP, periaxin discriminates patients with active disease from those with inactive disease (P < 0.0001), and plasma levels decrease following treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg). Elevated periaxin strongly predicts clinical worsening at 1 year [sensitivity 99%, specificity 72%, area under the curve (AUC) 0.86 (95% confidence interval, CI: 0.67-1)]. In GBS, peak levels of plasma periaxin and the ratio of periaxin to axonal biomarkers [neurofilament light chain (NfL) and peripherin] discriminate most cases of acute inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (AIDP) from acute motor axonal neuropathy (AMAN), as classified by electrophysiology (sensitivity 100%, specificity 86%, AUC = 0.94, 95% CI: 0.81-1). Serial measurements showed that plasma periaxin levels peak 2 to 3 weeks after GBS symptom onset, followed by a gradual decline in the weeks thereafter. In vitro, periaxin is higher following immune-mediated demyelination compared with axonal damage and control conditions. Plasma periaxin is a biomarker of peripheral nerve demyelination. Combined with axonal fluid biomarkers and existing clinical scales, periaxin has the potential to improve the clinical management of peripheral neuropathies, accelerating advances in care and experimental research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".