I found your article very interesting. I was diagnosed with SLE after many years of speculation due to symptoms but a low positive ANA. I had six confirmed miscarriages before ten weeks, one fetal death past ten weeks, and all of my living children were premature, one pregnancy with preeclampsia.

I wasn’t firmly given a diagnosis of lupus until my first episode of multiple PEs in both lungs, an episode of nephrotic syndrome, and pneumonitis all within a year’s time.

I’ve since had multiple different episodes of PEs, usually in both lungs, and one episode of DVT.

My last test was done with the anti-DFS70 marker checked and was positive. My first though was, “well crap, am I back to the drawing board for a diagnosis?” After going years feeling utterly horrible with multiple positive symptoms for lupus, but not getting a clear answer, it gets very frustrating to say the least.

I was interested in your study, because almost all I found indicated that it was almost certain I didn’t have SLE or any other connective tissue or rheumatologic disease based on this new marker. This was interesting in that it looked in another direction entirely.

I should note that in addition to myself all of my children show similar symptoms with severe joint pain, fatigue, incidences of pleurisy, joint inflammation at various times, Raynaud’s phenomenon, mouth and nose ulcers, etc. I’m positive something is happening to us I just am not sure what. My girls are scared to get pregnant not just because of the difficulties I had in my pregnancies, but also for fear of passing on something to their kids. I’ve spend the last five years in and out of ICU and CCU due to being so sick, but still just an ANA positive only, negative elsewhere, but I do have an elevated immune complement, which has never really been explained to me.

Forgot to mention, all other markers were negative such as Factor V, etc.)