Anti-nuclear autoantibodies: clinical utility for diagnosis, prognosis, monitoring, and planning of treatment strategy in systemic immunoinflammatory diseases.

The determination of serum autoantibodies to nuclear and cytoplasmic cell components is relevant to the diagnosis of chronic immunoinflammatory disorders. Detection is based on screening methods that allow antibody binding to intact cell structures, followed by use of assays to demonstrate their antigen target specificity. The results can be used to help clinicians set diagnosis and estimate prognosis, plan further diagnostic work-up, monitoring strategy and sometimes therapeutic approach. To obtain such accuracy of use clinicians need to be involved in revealing the differential diagnostic potential of the autoimmune serology test programme by furnishing detailed clinical data on patients from whom serum samples have been obtained. Borders between positive and negative values should aim at attaining a high diagnostic specificity towards clinically important disease controls.