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Whither smooth muscle antibodies in the third millennium?

Department of Immunopathology, ICPMR, Westmead Hospital, PO Box 60, Wentworthville NSW 2145, Australia

rogers@icpmr.wsahs.nsw.gov.au Lupoid hepatitis (now known as autoimmune hepatitis type I) was defined as an autoimmune disease by Mackay and colleagues in 1965.¹ An immunological marker of the disease was identified by Johnson et al in 1965 in the form of an "antismooth muscle antibody".^2,3 Over the following 30 years, smooth muscle antibody (SMA) has been used in the evaluation of patients with raised transaminases and has been given a defining role among diagnostic criteria for autoimmune hepatitis by the International Autoimmune Hepatitis Group.⁴ Testing of these criteria on defined patient cohorts showed the criteria to be robust in defining autoimmune hepatitis.⁵ Yet now, in the first year of the third millennium, SMA appears to have "fallen from grace". Hepatologists are dismissing the test as useless (numerous personal communications), whereas others assert in an influential publication that they "do not recommend its routine use for the diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis".⁶ As immunopathologists, . . . [Full text of this article]

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