Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Aug 7, 2021; 27(29): 4890-4899
Published online Aug 7, 2021. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v27.i29.4890
Poor performance of anti-mitochondrial antibodies for the diagnosis of primary biliary cholangitis in female Colombian patients: A single-center study
Valentina Guatibonza-García, Paula Valentina Gaete, Agustín Pérez-Londoño, Danna Kathalina Puerto-Baracaldo, Sebastián Antonio Gutiérrez-Romero, Carlos O Mendivil, Monica Tapias
Valentina Guatibonza-García, Paula Valentina Gaete, Agustín Pérez-Londoño, Danna Kathalina Puerto-Baracaldo, Sebastián Antonio Gutiérrez-Romero, Monica Tapias, School of Medicine, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá 110111, Colombia
Carlos O Mendivil, Section of Endocrinology, Department of Internal Medicine, Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, Bogotá 110111, Colombia
Monica Tapias, Department of Hepatology, Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, Bogotá 110111, Colombia
Author contributions: Tapias M and Mendivil CO conceived and supervised the study execution, and took part in the data analysis; Guatibonza-García V, Gaete PV, Pérez-Londoño A, Puerto-Baracaldo DK, and Gutiérrez-Romero SA participated in data collection, analysis, and interpretation; All authors drafted the manuscript and revised the article critically for important intellectual content.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Universidad de los Andes.
Informed consent statement: Being a retrospective analysis of anonymized data, this study was exempt from informed consent requirement by the Research Ethics Committee of the Universidad de los Andes.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There are no conflicts of interest to report.
Data sharing statement: Data are available from the corresponding author upon written request from a qualified researcher.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Monica Tapias, MD, Attending Doctor, Department of Hepatology, Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, Carrera 7 No.117-15, Bogotá 110111, Colombia. monictapias@yahoo.com
Received: January 29, 2021
Peer-review started: January 29, 2021
First decision: March 29, 2021
Revised: April 3, 2021
Accepted: April 22, 2021
Article in press: April 22, 2021
Published online: August 7, 2021
Processing time: 187 Days and 7.4 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) is confirmed by liver biopsy, but autoantibodies are frequently employed as an indirect diagnostic method. We studied 85 female adult Latin American patients, 43 with biopsy-confirmed PBC and 42 in whom liver biopsy ruled out PBC. The prevalence of anti-mitochondrial antibodies among PBC cases was only 44.2%. Anti-nuclear antibodies and anti-smooth muscle antibodies had similarly low diagnostic performance. Eighty-two percent of immunoglobulin M-positive individuals had fibrosis in their biopsy. Among female Latin American patients with PBC, the performance of any individual antibody for PBC diagnosis was quite limited.