Table 1.
Name and characteristics of serological tests.
Table 2.
Population characteristics.
Fig 1.
Adaptation of serological tests to treated CD patients.
ROC curve analysis was performed on treated celiac patients by plotting sensitivity against 100-specificity for all test values. The presence of VA was used as the positivity criteria. The area under curve (AUC) and its statistical significance were calculated for each curve and are summarized in Table 3.
Table 3.
Analytical performance of serological tests.
Fig 2.
Association of serological tests with degree of intestinal damage.
Antibody titers for each test were plotted for groups of patients with different intestinal damage as defined by the Marsh score. The horizontal line represents the median titer for each test. (*): the titers rise significantly with degree of intestinal damage (Kruskal-Wallis and Cuzick trend tests). (+): the titers are significantly higher in severe versus partial atrophy groups (Mann-Whitney test). (#): the titers are significantly higher in subnormal versus normal biopsy groups (Mann-Whitney test).
Fig 3.
Analysis of antibody positivity profile.
(a): Percentage of positive tests (Mean ±SEM) for each patient group. (b): Unsupervised hierarchical clustering of serological data. Each square represents the result of one test (lines) for one patient (columns), while its color represents the positivity level of the test. The test titers were normalized by calculating the ratio between titer and cut-off. Antibody titers close to cut-off values are represented by yellow squares, titers below cut-off range from yellow (cut-off) to green (very low titers) and titers above cut-off range from yellow (cut-off) to red (very high titers). (c): Proportion of histological scores in the patient clusters. (d): Unsupervised hierarchical clustering of serological data restricted to patients with partial atrophy (Marsh 3a).
Fig 4.
Correlation of patient clusters with gluten intake.
Proportion of patients with significant gluten intake, GFD for less than 2 years, GFD for more than 2 years in antibody-defined patient clusters A, B and C, calculated in Fig 3(A): All clustered patients, (b): Partial atrophy (Marsh 3a) patients.
Table 4.
Analytical performance of paired serological tests for association with VA persistence on intestinal biopsy in treated patients.