Objective:

The objective of this work was to describe the frequency of antinuclear antibody (ANA) staining patterns in patients with suspected autoimmune diseases in southeastern Mexico.

Materials and methods:

Hep2 cells and Anti-Human IgG coupled to FITC (EuroimmunTM) were used for analyzing samples through indirect immunofluorescence.

Results:

87.2 % per cent (89) of the total number of patients were women and 12.7 % were men (13) aged from 2 to 88 years. It was observed that 85 samples (70.6%) corresponded to the nucleolar pattern, 10 (9.8%) to the cytoplasmic pattern and 7 (6.8%) to the mitotic pattern. Of the nuclear patterns, 37 (36.8%), 17 (16.7%) and 12 samples (11.8%) corresponded to homogeneous, nuclear fine speckled and nuclear coarse speckled patterns respectively.

Conclusions:

In this work, it was observed that the highest frequency of antinuclear antibodies was found in patients of productive age. The most observed patterns were the homogeneous, nuclear fine speckled and nuclear coarse speckled. The homogeneous pattern is associated with SLE when presented in high titers.