Antibodies against phospholipids and oxidized LDL in alcoholic patients

Antiphospholipid antibodies (APA) are a generic term describing antibodies that recognize various phospholipids. Hepatocyte damage is a cardinal event in the course of alcoholic liver injury and autoantibodies against phospho lipids could play an important role in this process. APA in alcoholic patie nts seem to reflect membrane lesions, impairment of immunological reactivit y, liver disease progression and they correlate significantly with disease severity. LDL oxidation is supposed to be one of the most important pathoge nic mechanisms of atherosclerosis and antibodies against oxidized low-densi ty lipoprotein (oxLDL) are some kind of an epiphenomenon of this process. T he scope of our study was to determine some autoantibodies (IgG-oxLDL and a ntiphospholipid antibodies) and their possible changes in alcoholic patient s. We studied IgG-oxLDL and four APA - anticardiolipin antibodies (ACA), an tiphosphatidylserine antibodies (APSA) antiphosphatidylethanolamine antibod ies (APE) and antiphosphatidylcholine antibodies (APCA) in 35 alcoholic pat ients with mildly affected river function at the beginning of the abuse tre atment. The control group consisted of 60 healthy blood donors. In the stud ied group, we obtained positive results concerning total ACA in 17.1 % of a lcoholic patients (8.3 % in the control group), 11.4 % IgG-ACA (6.7 %), 8.6 % IgM-ACA (3.3 %), 14.3 % total APE (6.7 %), 14.3 % total APCA (8.3 %) and 20 % total APSA (8.3 % in the control group). The IgG-oxLDL (406.4+/-52.5 vs 499.9+/-52.5 mU/ml) was not affected in alcoholic patients. We conclude that the autoantibodies against oxLDL are present in sera of alcoholics and healthy blood donors. Based on our results which revealed a wide range of IgG-oxLDL titres in the healthy population, this parameter does not appear to be very promising for the evaluation of the risk of atherosclerosis. Alc oholics with only mild affection of liver functions did not exhibit a signi ficantly higher prevalence of all studied antiphospholipid antibodies (ACA, APSA, APE, APCA) which could read to membrane lesions in these patients.