Laboratório de Biomarcadores de Diagnóstico e Monitoração, Centro de Pesquisas René Rachou, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
J Immunol Methods. 2011 Jul 29;370(1-2):24-34. doi: 10.1016/j.jim.2011.05.003. Epub 2011 May 17.
Treatment success of chronically infected Chagas disease patients is laborious and a positive prognosis often is made only after repetitive serological and/or parasitological examinations with continuous negative results. Recently, we have developed a non-conventional flow-cytometric method in order to detect immunoglobulin G antibodies against live trypomastigote forms of Trypanosoma cruzi and showed its usefulness in the prognosis of treatment success. In the present study, we investigated the performance of flow-cytometric anti-live trypomastigote IgG antibodies (FC-ALTA) and flow-cytometric anti-fixed epimastigote IgG antibodies (FC-AFEA), as well as conventional serological methods, for early monitoring of benznidazole treated Chagas disease patients, e.g. 5years after treatment. The analysis of individual FC-ALTA reactivity along the titration curve before and after treatment, we were able to show, that between 4% and 13% of treated patients under evaluation presented with reduced serological reactivity and segregated from the other patient groups. Similar results were obtained with semi-quantitative, conventional indirect hemagglutination or indirect immunofluorescence. Our data therefore suggest that the combined use of conventional and non-conventional serological methods could provide more suitable cure criteria in early post-therapeutic prognosis of Chagas disease.
慢性感染恰加斯病患者的治疗成功是困难的，通常只有经过重复的血清学和/或寄生虫学检查，结果持续阴性，才能做出积极的预后判断。最近，我们开发了一种非传统的流式细胞术方法，用于检测针对活锥虫形式的克氏锥虫的免疫球蛋白 G 抗体，并证明其在治疗成功预后中的有用性。在本研究中，我们研究了流式细胞术抗活锥虫 IgG 抗体（FC-ALTA）和流式细胞术抗固定上皮内体 IgG 抗体（FC-AFEA）的性能，以及常规血清学方法，用于早期监测苯并咪唑治疗的恰加斯病患者，例如治疗 5 年后。通过分析治疗前后滴定曲线中个体 FC-ALTA 反应性，我们能够表明，在评估的治疗患者中，有 4%至 13%的患者血清学反应性降低，并与其他患者群体分离。半定量常规间接血凝试验或间接免疫荧光试验也得到了类似的结果。因此，我们的数据表明，常规和非传统血清学方法的联合使用可能为恰加斯病治疗后早期预后提供更合适的治愈标准。
