A search for antibodies against glial cells in the serum and cerebrospinal fluid of patients with multiple sclerosis and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

We have used indirect immunofluorescence to examine the binding of immunoglobulin in sera from patients with multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, other neurological diseases, and normal subjects to marker-identified glial cells in dissociated primary cell cultures of neonatal rat corpus callosum and sciatic nerve. In corpus callosum cultures all the sera tested showed weak surface staining of oligodendrocytes and of a small percentage of astrocytes and bright staining of fibroblasts. The cerebrospinal fluid from one patient with multiple sclerosis showed the same pattern of staining while the cerebrospinal fluid from other patients with multiple sclerosis and pathological controls only showed weak staining of fibroblasts. None of the sera stained the cytoplasm of oligodendrocytes in frozen sections of adult rat optic nerve. In sciatic nerve cultures all sera showed weak staining of Schwann cells and fibroblasts. Thus we were unable to distinguish patients with demyelinating diseases from normal individuals or from patients with other neurological diseases in terms of serum or cerebrospinal fluid anti-glial cell antibodies.