Frequency of antibodies to mutated citrullinated vimentin in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: comment on the article by Demoruelle et al

We retrospectively investigated the frequency of anti-mutated citrullinated vimentin (anti-MCV) in 43 COPD patients without evidences of RA (mean age 72; sex F/M 7/36) and 30 RA patients matched for sex and age. All subjects were tested for anti-MCV using an ELISA test (ORGENTEC, Germany). As expected, anti-MCV levels were higher in RA patients than in patients with COPD (mean U/mL + SD: 374 + 379 vs 25 + 54 U/ml; P=0.0001). Nevertheless, according to our cutoff (> 20 U/ml), 6 COPD patients (14%) resulted positive for anti-MCV. Even if this is only a proof of concept study involving a small number of patients, our data seem to confirm the intriguing relationship between lung disease and the production of RA-related autoantibodies.