The detection of certain antibodies can help support the autoimmune etiology and direct the search for associated cancer as well as targeted therapy. However, among all the positive test results, there are certain patients having clinically irrelevant neuronal antibodies. This could sometimes create a dilemma to clinicians when a clinical picture is not clear and can lead to unnecessary studies or therapies. Abboud H, et al. proposed a neuronal antibody confidence scale to aid for differentiation of clinically irrelevant antibody.

We reviewed 80 patients who presented to University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and were tested positive for the Mayo Clinic serum paraneoplastic panel from Jan. 1^st, 2014 to Dec. 31^st, 2015. We divided these patients into two groups: clinically relevant (CR) and clinically irrelevant (CI). In the CR group, an autoimmune neurological syndrome was confirmed at the end of the investigation, and in the CI group, an alternative diagnosis other than autoimmune was found. We used Logistic regression for multivariate analysis and Chi-squared for univariate analysis to look at the difference between the two groups.