ABSTRACT
Murine autoimmune gastritis (AIG) is induced experimentally by thymectomy on day 3 after birth (d3-Tx) in BALB/c mice (1,2). It resembles human AIG associated with pernicious anemia, which is a paradigm of organspecific autoimmune diseases including insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Histopathologically, there is selective loss of parietal cells from the corpus gland as well as lymphocyte infiltration and the production of autoantibodies to parietal cells (2,3). Although the etiology of autoimmune diseases are largely unclear at present, the studies using this murine AIG model has demonstrated several important findings for elucidating the pathogenesis of organ-specific autoimmune diseases.
