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Rheumatology Advance Access published online on November 23, 2006
Rheumatology, doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kel370
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Editorial

Microchimeric cells: guardians or actors of immunity in scleroderma?

N. C. Lambert

Laboratoire d'Immuno-Rhumatologie, INSERM U639, 27, Bd Jean Moulin, 13385 Marseille, Cedex 5, France

Correspondence to: Nathalie Lambert, PhD, INSERM, U639, Faculté de Médecine La Timone, 13005 Marseille, France. E-mail: nathalie.lambert@medecine.univ-mrs.fr

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

About 80% of all people with autoimmune diseases are women. Many suggestions have been proposed to interpret the reasons of such a gender difference: hormones, stronger immune response in women, different secretion of immuno-modulators according to sex ... [1]. The recent knowledge that during pregnancy fetal cells pass through the placental barrier to reach the maternal circulation and inversely maternal cells reach the fetal circulation, more importantly that these cells and/or DNA could persist for decades in their respective hosts, gave new perspectives to interpret this gender gap. According to bi-directional traffic of cells during pregnancy, being a parous woman is a challenging status of being a chimera hosting unexpected semi-foreign fetus cells called fetal microchimeric cells as well as maternal microchimeric cells remaining after woman's own intra-uterine life. Nevertheless immune balance has to be maintained.

Systemic sclerosis or scleroderma (SSc) is an autoimmune disease affecting mostly women . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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