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Clin. Vaccine Immunol. doi:10.1128/CVI.00381-07
Copyright (c) 2007, American Society for Microbiology and/or the Listed Authors/Institutions. All Rights Reserved.

Humoral immune responses of Type-1 Diabetes patients to M. avium subspecies paratuberculosis lend support to the infectious trigger hypothesis

Dipartimento di Scienze Biomediche, Università di Sassari, Viale San Pietro 43b, 07100 Sassari, Italy (LAS,DP,SS,AP, SZ); Istituto di Microbiologia, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Roma, Italy; Pathogen Evolution Laboratory, Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India (NA)

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: sechila{at}uniss.it.

	Abstract

Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) is a zoonotic pathogen whose association with Crohn's disease in humans is under scrutiny. Objective of this work was to investigate its association with other chronic diseases such as the type-1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), where, the involvement of a persistent pathogen as MAP could be the trigger. For this, forty-six diabetic patients with 50 healthy controls were investigated for the presence of antibodies against two recombinant proteins of MAP and the whole cell lysate. Extremely significant humoral immune responses to recombinant HBHA and GSD proteins and the whole cell lysates of the MAP bacilli were recorded in T1DM patients as compared to healthy controls. Finding evidence of Map involvement in T1DM is perhaps a novel finding that might serve as a foundation stone in establishing an infectious aetiology for T1DM.