The Diagnostic Yield of Antiacetylcholine Receptor Antibodies Versus Antimuscle Kinase Antibodies in Ocular Myasthenia Gravis: A Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Ocular myasthenia gravis (OMG) is an autoimmune disease characterized by autoantibodies targeting postsynaptic proteins at the neuromuscular junction, leading to weakness and fatigability of the levator palpebrae superioris, orbicularis oculi and extraocular muscles. Although OMG is primarily a clinical diagnosis, serological antibody testing, predominantly acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibodies, is usually performed. The clinical utility of muscle-specific kinase (MuSK) antibodies is less well established in OMG. This meta-analysis evaluates the use of anti-AChR and anti-MuSK in patients with OMG and the relative costs of simultaneous vs sequential testing. METHODS: Studies were extracted from Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Embase (Ovid), Medline (Ovid), and additional gray literature. A systematic review was conducted using Covidence with 2 independent reviewers for study selection and data extraction. The meta-analysis was conducted with R version 4.4.1 on RStudio, and the meta package. Depending on the level of heterogeneity, either a fixed-effects or random-effects model was used to pool the data. Funnel plots were used to assess publication bias. RESULTS: The pooled analysis of 44 studies (n = 4,937 patients with OMG) revealed 59% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 52%-66%) positivity for anti-AChR, whereas the pooled analysis of 34 studies with (n = 3,380) showed 5% (95% CI: 2%-9%) positivity for anti-MuSK. From 62 studies (n = 5,180), 4 patients (0.1%) were doubly seropositive for anti-AChR and anti-MuSK. In patients with OMG positive for AChR antibodies, 5 studies (n = 527) reported a thymoma prevalence of 35% (95% CI: 3%-90%), underscoring the clinical value of anti-AChR testing. Four studies (n= 259) showed that anti-AChR positive patients had a 1.82 (95% CI: 1.15-2.88) times greater risk of progressing from OMG to generalized myasthenia gravis. CONCLUSIONS: Almost two-thirds (59%) of the patients with OMG tested positive for AChR antibodies, but MuSK antibodies were only detected in 5% of patients. Positivity for anti-AChR in OMG was associated with a worse prognosis, including a higher prevalence of thymomas and an increased risk of disease generalization. Given the relatively low prevalence of anti-MuSK and the higher cost of anti-MuSK testing, clinicians could consider a stepwise approach to the serological diagnosis of OMG, where anti-MuSK is ordered only if the initial anti-AChR returns negative.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".