Taken together, this questions whether pathogenic, autoreactive CD8 +T cells are the only drivers of disease, and that all cases of AA, represent a genuine, autoantigen-dependent autoimmune disease (Bertolini et al., 2020; Paus et al., 2018) in the strictly defined sense of this term (Rose and Bona, 1993). Here, CD8A is linked to autoimmune disease.