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Previous Volume 359:307-309 July 17, 2008 Number 3 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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Intravenous immune globulin is a therapeutic preparation of normal human polyclonal IgG obtained from plasma pooled from several thousand healthy blood donors. Initially used in treating primary and secondary immune deficiencies, intravenous immune globulin is increasingly used for the treatment of diverse autoimmune and systemic inflammatory diseases including immune thrombocytopenia, Guillain–Barré syndrome, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, myasthenia gravis, dermatomyositis, and Kawasaki's syndrome.

Several non–mutually exclusive mechanisms have been proposed to explain the beneficial effects of intravenous immune globulin in patients.¹ One such process was proposed by Ravetch et al. in 2006²: that the beneficial effect of intravenous immune globulin . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

From the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Université Paris Descartes, Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, Paris.

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