Phenotypic Analysis of Disease-Relevant T Cells in Dermatitis Herpetiformis

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Gluten-specific CD4+ T cells are central players in the pathogenesis of celiac disease (CeD), an inflammatory disease driven by exposure to dietary gluten proteins. Patients with CeD are treated with a lifelong gluten-free diet. When gluten is reintroduced to the diet of patients in remission, there is a wave of activated (CD38+) gluten-specific CD4+ T cells in the blood that peaks on days 6‒8 after the first gluten exposure. This increase in the frequency of activated gluten-specific CD4+ effector-memory T cells (TEM) in the blood can be detected by IFN-γ enzyme-linked immunospot assay (Anderson et al., 2000; Tye-Din et al., 2010) or by HLA-DQ:gluten tetramers (Ráki et al., 2007; Sarna et al., 2018b; Zühlke et al., 2019).