Susumu Sugai’s research while affiliated with Kanazawa Medical University and other places

... Although autoimmunity is debated as a potential cause of IC/BPS, clinical evidence suggests that it may play an important role in the pathophysiology of the disease. It has been reported that IC/BPS patients develop antinuclear and anti-urothelium autoantibodies [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] , overexpress urothelial HLA-DR molecules [12][13][14] , and co-present with other autoimmune diseases such as bronchial asthma, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren's syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] . Considerable data have been published on the histopathology of bladder specimens, demonstrating a role of cell-mediated immune mechanisms in IC/BPS [14,22] . ...

Reference:

Regulatory T cells suppress autoreactive CD4 + T cell response to bladder epithelial antigen