An international study involving the Nice University Hospital and the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital :
- evaluated IgG reactivity to a panel of 357 proteins in a total of 874 people, including 31 with sporadic inclusion myositis;
- IgG anti-NDUFA11 (for NADH dehydrogenase 1 α subcomplex 11) was found to be more frequent in inclusion myositis (9.7% of cases) than in patients with dermatomyositis (1.3%), polymyositis (2.8%), systemic lupus (1.4%) or in a control population (2%);
- in a confirmatory phase, anti-NDUFA11 was found in 10 out of 287 patients with inclusion myositis, but in none of the 59 patients with polymyositis or dermatomyositis.
NDUFA11, which belongs to the mitochondrial respiratory chain, could ultimately be an autoantigen specific to inclusion myositis. It should be noted that the presence of abnormalities in muscle mitochondria was already one of the factors used to support a diagnosis of the disease.
