heavy chain disease

Heavy chain disease is a form of paraproteinemia and plasma cell dyscrasia that involves the proliferation of cells producing immunoglobulin heavy chains.This disease is characterized by an excessive production of heavy chains that are short and truncated. These heavy chain disease proteins have various deletions, mainly in their amino-terminal part, which causes the heavy chains to lose the ability to form disulfide bonds with the light chains. The defect in the immunoglobulins presumably arises ...