Gold Nephropathy — Effect of Gold on Immune Response to Renal Tubular Basement Membrane (TBM) Antigen in Mice

Abstract

Renal injuries that follow administration of gold salt in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis are well recognized (1,2). Changes are seen distributed both in the glomerular and tubular regions studied by light and electron microscopy (1,2). Using guinea pigs, we have reported that injection of gold produces tubulointerstitial nephritis with positive anti-renal tubular basement membrane (TBM) autoantibody and immune complex nephropathy with positive anti-renal tubular epithelial (RTE) autoantibody (3) . It is of interest that autoimmune diseases are induced by gold treatment. Measel (4) reported that gold not only had an immunosuppressive effect but also an immunoenhancing effect, depending on dosage. Lando et al. (5) reported that appropriate low doses of cyclophosphamide induce encephalomyelitis in genetically resistant mouse strains, suggesting that low doses cyclophosphamide deletes activity of suppressor T cells. With the assumption that an appropriate dose of gold would have the same effect as cyclophosphamide, we attempted to induce interstitial nephritis (IN) in genetically resistant C57BL/6 (6) mice by pretreatment with gold and immunization with syngeneic TBM antigen in complete Freund’s adjuvant. We also studied the effect of gold on immune response to TBM antigen and on development IN in high responder BALB/c mice.