Tehran University Medical Journal

Background: Alopecia areata is a common, inflamatory and chronic disease of hair and nails, which in some cases result in growth inhibition and lose of hairs. Several factors such as genetic factors, autoimmunity, atopy, stress, fear etc, are known as effective factors in induction and severity of the disease, but the ethiology of this disease is not known exactly so far. Some evidences such as presence of an autoantibodies against hair follicules and infiltration of immunocompetent cells in affected areas of the disease lead that most investigators classify alopecia as autoimmune disease. In one investigation in immunology department of Tarbiat Modarres university concerning the humoral immunity in alopecia pathogenesis some evidences were found for the presences of a neoantigen in affected hair follicles. Since various studies indicates that cellular arm of the immune system is more important in alopecia areata pathogenesis, in this investigation we studied the existence of neoantigens in affected hair follicles using lymphocyte transformation test (LTT).

Materials and Methods: The proliferation responses of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (MNC) from alopecia patients and normal individuals were investigated against the follicular extracts of affected and normal hairs separately.

Results: Our results indicate a non significant difference between proliferation responses of MNC’s from alopecia patients and normal controls against follicular extract of normal hairs. These responses were not significantly different against folliclar extracts of affected hairs as well. Regarding our results.

Conclusion: We could not show the existence of a neoantigen in alopecia hair follicles, but the obtained results can not completely reject the role of a neoantigen in alopecia pathogenesis as well, because in LTT the responding cells are of memory type and these cells may be very low in peripheral blood. The immune response in this disease may be restricted to affected areas such as hair follicles, so non-different proliferation response of peripheral blood lymphocytes can not exactly reflect the quality of immune response in affected areas. More investigations are needed to clear this matter.