Comparative evaluation of some methods for detection of M. pneumoniae antibodies.

Various methods of detection are available for measuring antibodies specific to M. pneumoniae. We examined over 600 sera of patients with clinical diagnosis of M. pneumoniae infection using complement fixation (CF) test. 91 gave positive reaction and were therefore selected for a comparative analysis with other methods such as metabolic inhibition (MI), mycoplasmocidal (MC) and radioimmunoprecipitation (RIP) methods. MC and RIP test gave antibody titers comparatively higher than MI and CF. Comparative studies on the sensitivity of the various methods considered were also carried out on 6 paired sera collected from the same patients at 10 days intervals. The increase in antibody titers were much higher when MC and RIP tests were considered. When RIP and MC methods were compared, the first appeared more sensitive in all cases studied.