Conclusions
To our best knowledge, this is the first report investigating the content of broad spectrum of autoantibodies in therapeutics used for IRT and their clinical relevance. We identified high quantities of anti-GAD and anti-TPO autoantibodies in all investigated therapeutics that may be passively transfered to the patients’ blood circulation.
Despite the fact that IRT may lead to autoantibody transfer, we found no evidence that this mechanism would contribute to the clinical manifestation of the autoimmune diseases, compromising the safety of IRT. However, it might interfere with the disease diagnosis. Based on our results, we recommend that anti-GAD and anti-TPO should not be used for the screening or diagnosis of T1D and AIT in CVID patients on regular immunoglobulin subtitution therapy. Instead, the measurement of glycemia, C-peptide, gHb and thyroid ultrasound, respectivelly, may be the screening methods of choice.