Prevalence of anti-histone antibodies, their clinical significance and correlation with other autoantibodies in a cohort of Italian scleroderma patients

Purpose The aim of our study was to determine the prevalence, clinical significance of antibodies to individual histone components and to evaluate their correlation with other autoantibody specificities in a cohort of Italian SSc patients. Some authors, demonstrated high prevalence of anti-histone antibodies in Italian SSc patients, associated with cardiac and renal involvement, suggesting a prognostic value of these autoantibodies; however, these data need to be confirmed.