BIG THING!!! ANOCTAMIN-2 AND ENDOTHELIAL CELLS !!!

[frodo]

Anoctamin-2 is a protein expressed in muscle cells and venous endotelium. You can read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium-a ... de_channel (Anoctamin)

And why do I post this? Because of this new article:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/ ... 3113.short

The authors have screened plasma samples from patients with MS looking for autoimmune cells and they have found some of them, but not against the CNS. They have found autoimmunity against the endothelium of the veins!!!!!!

PS: The do not state that. That's is only a possible conclusion that I thought of after reading the article and what Anoctamin is.

[CureOrBust]

I have to admit I have not read the article nor have any medical training, and so its with no authority i say, I am not all that surprised to hear that they did not find autoimmunity against CNS components outside of the CNS itself.

It was interesting to hear that they did however find auto-immunity against the endothelium. That sounds new to me.

[1eye]

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/ ... ith-ds=yes

Significance
Despite the growing evidence that autoantibodies are team players in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis (MS), the target autoantigens are yet to be identified. In this work, we mined the autoantibody repertoire within MS by screening more than 2,000 plasma samples from patients with MS and controls and identified increased autoantibody reactivity against an ion-channel protein called “anoctamin 2” (ANO2). This finding points toward an ANO2 autoimmune sub-phenotype in MS and might contribute to the development of clinical algorithms to characterize a subgroup of MS patients.

If, as surmised by frodo, this is how these autoantibodies work, they may have that in common with vasculitis. My mother died of that (and heart disease).

I did not find in my skimming any mention of the endothelium. I found that a similar protein, ANO1, is very definitely involved in vascular issues, but ANO2 seems more involved in smell and vision.