The clinical utility of antihistone antibodies. Autoantibodies reactive with chromatin in systemic lupus erythematosus and drug-induced lupus.

Autoantibodies reactive with denatured histones and with epitopes requiring the native histone-DNA structure in chromatin have been measured by many techniques. The presence of antichromatin antibodies is useful in diagnosing systemic lupus erythematosus and in diagnosing lupus induced by procainamide and certain other drugs such as quinidine, isoniazid, sulfasalazine and acebutolol. In contrast, antibodies to denatured histones do not appear to be diagnostically useful at this time.