Tiny Killers: How Autoantibodies Attack the Heart in Lupus Patients Deck : Columbia team engineers a model of the human heart tissue that demonstrates how autoantibodies directly affect heart disease in lupus patients Newswise — New York, NY—August 20 , 2024— Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in patients suffering from lupus, an autoimmune disease in which our immune system attacks our own tissues and organs, the heart, blood, lung, joints, brain, and skin. Lupus myocarditis--inflammation of the heart muscle-- can be very serious because the inflammation alters the regularity of the rhythm and strength of the heartbeat. However, the mechanisms underlying this complex disease are poorly understood and difficult to study.
A long-standing question about lupus is why some patients develop myocarditis while others remain unaffected. And why the clinical manifestations of affected patients range so dramatically, from no symptoms at all to severe heart failure. Lupus is characterized by a large number of autoantibodies, immune proteins that mistakenly target a person's own tissues or organs, with different specificities for various molecules.
Like our genes, they may explain why different individuals experience different symptoms. Researchers have long suspected that specific autoantibody signatures could hold the key to the puzzling clinical variations they observe in lupus patients. Thus far, identifying autoantibodies involved in heart damage has been inc.