Polymyositis and Cell-Mediated Immunity

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Abstract
Polymyositis has usually been included with the connective-tissue diseases because of certain well recognized clinical and laboratory overlaps. However, aside from the demonstration of immune complexes in muscle-vessel walls, particularly in childhood dermatomyositis,1 evidence for an immunologic mechanism for the tissue injury has in most patients been sparse. Hypergammaglobulinemia, if present, is usually modest, hypocomplementemia is rare, and there is no renal involvement. It is for these reasons that a number of investigators have in recent years explored the possibility that a cellular immune mechanism is responsible for the muscle injury that characterizes this disease. From these studies has come . . .