Prevalence of Autoantibodies to Cardiac Troponin T in Healthy Blood Donors

Abstract

Recently, human IgG reactive with cardiac troponin (cTn) I has received attention as a potential cause of false-negative results in some immunoassays for that antigen (1) and was further suggested as a possible contributor to idiopathic cardiomyopathy (2)(3) and poor outcome after myocardial infarction (4). The incidence of autoantibodies to cTnI is high in apparently healthy blood donors (12.7%) as well as in sample cohorts characterized on the basis of clinical biomarkers associated with cardiac, infectious, and autoimmune diseases (5). We report that autoantibodies reactive with the cTn T isoform have a similar prevalence to that seen for the I isoform. Briefly, frozen plasma and serum samples from apparently healthy blood donors (n = 467), all of which had been approved for research use by the institutional review board, were obtained from the Abbott Laboratories specimen bank and thawed at 2–8 °C before use. The average age of the individuals donating these samples was 39.7 years (range 18–72 years), and the sex distribution …