摘要 : TO THE EDITOR Although the pathogenesis of the majority of chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU) patients is unknown, approximately 40% of patients are proposed to have "functional" IgG autoantibo-dies against either the high-affinit... 展开 TO THE EDITOR Although the pathogenesis of the majority of chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU) patients is unknown, approximately 40% of patients are proposed to have "functional" IgG autoantibo-dies against either the high-affinity IgE receptor (FcepsilonRIalpha) or IgE as measured by the basophil histamine-releasing activity (HRA) assay (Ferrer and Kaplan, 2007). This assay involves incubating basophils from a healthy donor with a CIU patient's serum and measuring histamine release. A "positive" result is often judged in relation to basophil HRA levels obtained with serum from a noh-CIU population. Some investigators have proposed that the presence of "functional" autoantibodies offers a pathogenic explanation for patients' symptoms or provides a rationale for treatment with immunomodulatory therapy such as cyclosporine (Sabroe and Greaves, 2006). However, the HRA assay, which is considered the "gold standard" (Ferrer and Kaplan, 2007) for "functional" autoantibodies, has limitations. Its performance depends on the unique characteristics of the healthy basophil donors (Eckman et al., 2008). In addition, interlaboratory reproduci- bility of this test has not been possible to assess because of a lack of universally available standardized reagents. 收起