Evaluation of a colloidal gold immunochromatography assay in the detection of Treponema pallidum specific IgM antibody in syphilis serofast reaction patients: a serologic marker for the relapse and infection of syphilis

Abstract

Syphilis remains as a worldwide public health problem; hence, it is necessary to develop a new diagnostic approach that is easier and faster than conventional tests. A new testing method to detect Treponema pallidum IgM (TP-IgM), named colloidal gold immunochromatography assay (GICA), is presented in place of fluorescent treponemal antibody absorption (FTA-Abs). TP-IgM was detected using GICA developed on syphilis-specific recombinant proteins TPN17 and TPN47. The FTA-Abs IgM test was set as the gold standard. A GICA TP-IgM test was performed to detect syphilis in 1208 patients who received recommended therapy for syphilis for more than 1 year at the Xiamen Center of Clinical Laboratory in China from June 2005 to May 2009. One hundred blood donors were set up as control. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, positive likelihood ratio, and negative likelihood ratio were 98.21%, 99.04%, 93.75%, 99.73%, 102.3, and 0.018, respectively. Detection on 500 interference specimens indicated that the biological false-positive rate of the GICA test was extremely low and was free from other biological and chemical factors. The patients were divided into the following experimental groups based on the results of toluidine red unheated serum test (TRUST) and treponemal pallidum particle agglutination (TPPA): (1) the syphilis serofast reaction (SSR) group consisted of 411 cases with (+) TRUST and (+) TPPA, which exhibited no clinical manifestations of syphilis after 1 year of recommended syphilis treatment; (2) the serum cure group, which was further subdivided into group A, a group that consisted of 251 cases with (−) TRUST and (+) TPPA, and (3) group B, a group that consisted of 546 cases with (−) TRUST and (−) TPPA; and (4) the blood donor control group, which consisted of 100 healthy persons with (−) ELISA-TP and (−) TPPA. We used the FTA-Abs method and the GICA method to detect TP-IgM; the positive rate of TP-IgM in 411 SSR patients was 34.55% and 36.01%, respectively. However, in serum cure group A, the positive rate of TP-IgM was 10.36% and 11.16%, respectively. The χ2 test revealed that there is a significant difference in the positive rate between these 2 groups (P < 0.01). The TP-IgM positive rate in the same group, as detected by the GICA method and the FTA-Abs method, had no significant difference in statistics. However, as detected by the GICA method and the FTA-Abs method, all the samples in serum cure group B and the control group were negative for TP-IgM. The TP-IgM–positive result demonstrated that active T. pallidum remained in the bodies of SSR patients. In summary, the characteristics of GICA TP-IgM correspond to that of FTA-Abs TP-IgM; this can be used as a serologic marker for the relapse and infection of syphilis in place of the conventional FTA-Abs IgM test.