[HTML][HTML] Revisiting IgG antibody reactivity to Epstein-Barr virus in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and its potential application to disease …

N Sepúlveda, J Malato, F Sotzny, AD Grabowska… - Frontiers in …, 2022 - frontiersin.org
N Sepúlveda, J Malato, F Sotzny, AD Grabowska, A Fonseca, C Cordeiro, L Graça, P Biecek
Frontiers in Medicine, 2022frontiersin.org
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. 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-
analysed a previously published microarray data on the IgG antibody responses against …
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. 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-analysed 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 be used to distinguish patients from healthy controls. A similar finding was obtained when comparing patients with noninfectious or unknown disease trigger to healthy controls. However, when data analysis was restricted to the comparison between HCs and patients with a putative infection at 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. When a bioinformatic analysis was performed on these epitopes, it revealed a potential molecular mimicry with several human proteins. To confirm these promising findings, a follow-up study will be conducted in a separate cohort of patients.
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