Skip Navigation



Rheumatology Advance Access published online on September 5, 2007
Rheumatology, doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kem219
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
46/10/1517    most recent
kem219v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Disclaimer
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Carp, H. J. A.
Right arrow Articles by Shoenfeld, Y.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Carp, H. J. A.
Right arrow Articles by Shoenfeld, Y.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. 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

Recurrent spontaneous abortions in antiphospholipid syndrome: natural killer cells—an additional mechanism in a multi factorial process

H. J. A. Carp and Y. Shoenfeld1,*

Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer & Tel Aviv University, Israel and 1Department of Internal Medicine B and Center for Autoimmune Diseases, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.

Correspondence to: Y. Shoenfeld, MD FRCP, Department of Internal Medicine B, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, 52621, Israel. E-mail: shoenfel@post.tau.ac.il

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

In this issue, Perricone et al. have shown that patients with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) and recurrent spontaneous abortions (RSA) have higher levels of natural killer (NK) cells than those with APS and no RSA. NK cells have long been suspected to cause RSA since Aoki's original report [1] showing that increased numbers of NK cells in the peripheral blood of women with RSA predict the likelihood of another miscarriage. NK cells are the only lymphocytes found in the endometrium in pregnancy, and are able to induce apoptosis in the trophoblast if cytokine activated. There have even been attempts to reduce NK cell levels with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) [2] or immunization with paternal leucocytes (PLI) [3], to prevent subsequent miscarriages. There are two questions: what are the roles of NK cells, and whether NK cells explain part of . . . [Full Text of this Article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?