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Journal of Clinical Microbiology, October 2002, p. 3782-3788, Vol. 40, No. 10
0095-1137/02/$04.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JCM.40.10.3782-3788.2002
Copyright © 2002, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Departament de Genètica i de Microbiologia, Facultat de Ciències i Institut de Biotecnologia i Biomedicina, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra,1 Servei de Microbiologia, Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol, Badalona,2 Programa de Control i Prevenció de la Tuberculosi, Departament de Salut i Seguretat Social, Barcelona, Spain,3 Institut de Pharmacologie et de Biologie Structurale du CNRS, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France4
Received 30 January 2002/ Returned for modification 30 June 2002/ Accepted 25 July 2002
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In spite of the presence of high IgA antibody levels in sera from TB patients (9) and although different commercialized assays exist that detect IgA antibodies against cellular extracts and purified proteins (14, 16, 23), to date no analysis has been undertaken to determine the presence of specific IgA against the glycolipids mentioned above.
For the first time, the present study analyzed the IgA antibody response to mycobacterial glycolipids, compared with the IgG and IgM response, in a wide population of patients affected by TB and non-TB pulmonary infections, as well as in healthy people. Moreover, the study was carried out in parallel with four M. tuberculosis glycolipids, using an ELISA method specifically optimized for them (15).
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TABLE 1. Demographic and clinical data for TB patients and controls
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(ii) Control subjects. One hundred thirty-six HIV-seronegative serum samples were also included as negative controls (Table 1). Fifty of these were from non-TB pneumonia patients. These diseases were originated by Chlamydia spp. (12 serum samples), Coxiella burnetii (6 samples), Legionella pneumophila (11 samples), Mycoplasma pneumoniae (9 samples from adults and 4 from children), and Streptococcus pneumoniae (8 samples). They were all purified protein derivative (PPD) negative. Moreover, two serum samples included in this group were from patients with other pulmonary mycobacterial diseases: one produced by Mycobacterium kansasii and the other by Mycobacterium xenopi. The sera from these non-TB pneumonia patients were obtained from the Microbiology Service Seroteca at the HUGTiP.
Eighty-four sera were taken from healthy controls: 44 of these were PPD negative, 9 had been BCG vaccinated in the past, and 22 were PPD positive (8 adults and 14 children). Three serum samples were included from adults who had suffered from TB more than 5 years prior to sampling; they had received the standard treatment for TB and had completed it correctly. In addition, six sera were taken from children upon termination of standard treatment. These healthy control sera were obtained from employees of the HUGTiP or Ph.D. students, or they were collected from the Barcelona Tuberculosis Prevention and Control Programme. All sera were aliquoted and stored at -40°C until use.
ELISA glycolipids. For glycolipid isolation, an M. tuberculosis clinically isolated strain (22) was grown for 6 weeks at 37°C on Middlebrook 7H10 supplemented with oleic acid-albumin-dextrose-catalase enrichment (Difco Laboratories, Detroit, Mich.). DAT, TAT, SL-I, and CF were purified using column chromatography as previously described (21, 22). ELISA was performed as described elsewhere (15). Briefly, plates (Immulon I; Dynatech Laboratories) were coated with purified DAT, TAT, CF, or SL-I (1,000 ng each in 50 µl of n-hexane/well). Sera were diluted in blocking buffer at predetermined optimal dilutions (1/400 for measuring IgG antibodies, 1/200 for IgM, and 1/100 for IgA). All points were duplicated. Goat anti-human IgG, IgM, and IgA alkaline phosphatase conjugates (Southern Biotechnology Associates, Inc., Birmingham, Ala.) at a 1/3,000 dilution in blocking buffer were added. Absorbance was determined at 405 nm with a microtiter reader (ELx 800 automated microplate reader; Bio-Tech Instruments, Inc.).
Data analysis.
Final calculations were performed as previously described (6) with slight modifications. To correlate the data for day-to-day variations, three titrated sera having low, medium, and high levels (standards) and a blank (blocking buffer) were included in each plate. A curve was drawn for each plate, and the comparison of their slopes was carried out. If these data were not satisfactory (slope below 98%), the plate was rejected. Moreover, to detect nonspecific absorption, wells treated with solvent alone (i.e., without any antigen) were included for each serum tested and were used as a second negative control. The values of tested sera were corrected as follows: the difference between absorbance of serum and nonspecific absorption (zero) was taken and the mean value was calculated. The normalized data were then calculated to establish the corrected
405 values by using the curve of standards.
Arithmetic means and standard deviations (SD) from the mean were calculated for corrected optical density (OD) values. The cutoff points chosen were equal to the means of the OD corrected readings obtained with sera from all of the healthy individuals, plus 3 SD for each antigen-Ig combination. To adjust the cutoff value, we selected the mean plus 2 SD measured in the overall control population.
Statistical treatment of results. The significance of the difference between means was calculated using the Mann-Whitney U test. Comparison between several groups was made using the Kruskal-Wallis analysis (12). Sensitivity and specificity were calculated by standard methods. All statistical tests were conducted using SPSS for Windows statistical software (version 9.0; SPSS, Chicago, Ill.).
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Mean and individual antibody levels. In TB adult patients, the mean values of IgG and IgA antibodies to each of the four glycolipid antigens tested were significantly elevated (P < 0.001) above those of the overall control sera (healthy and non-TB pneumonia) (Fig. 1). Differences in the IgM antibody levels were observed between the TB patients and the overall control groups for the DAT and TAT antigens, but not when using the SL-I and CF antigens. For all the antigens and Igs tested, no significant differences were observed between the mean values of the different groups of healthy controls within each test. However, the non-TB pneumonia patients did show higher levels (P < 0.001) than the rest of the controls in each test (Fig. 1).
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FIG. 1. Results of the ELISA for glycolipids in sera from adult subjects. Individual absorbance values for each test are shown. Each dot indicates an individual serum sample. The dotted line indicates cutoff values above which a test is positive (mean + 3 SD of the healthy population values). Pulm TB, pulmonary TB; Extra TB, extrapulmonary TB; PPD-, healthy PPD negative; PPD+, healthy PPD positive; Vaccin, healthy vaccinated; Healed, healthy healed; Mycob, other mycobacterial diseases; and Other resp dis, other respiratory diseases.
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Sensitivity and specificity. In Table 2, the reactivity of pulmonary TB, extrapulmonary TB, smear-positive, and smear-negative samples are represented. This table shows that higher test sensitivities were obtained in smear-positive TB patients than in smear-negative patients, and in pulmonary TB with respect to extrapulmonary TB (Table 2). Considering all the adult populations in this study, the highest test sensitivity was obtained when detecting IgG antibodies against the SL-I antigen (81%, with a specificity of 77.6%). Sensitivity values above 65% were obtained for the following test combinations: TAT IgA (74.3%), TAT IgG (68.9%), and SL-I IgA (66.2%). The SL-I IgG test was the most efficient for detecting smear-negative TB cases. Among healthy adult subjects, only 1 or 2 serum samples out of 64 were positive for some of the tests, so test specificities between 96.8 and 100% were obtained. However, these percentages dropped in non-TB pneumonia patients. Around 50% of non-TB pneumonia patients reacted to the SL-I IgG, TAT IgG, and TAT IgA tests (Table 2). On the other hand, only 29% of these patients reacted to SL-I IgA. Taking this control population (non-TB pneumonia patients) into account, the SL-I IgA test was the most specific (87.5%, with a sensitivity of 66.2%).
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TABLE 2. Seropositive adult subjects with each of the 12 serological tests
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Test sensitivities lower than 25% were obtained in all the tests when detecting IgM antibodies in adult patients. With respect to child TB, very low sensitivity values were obtained in all tests (between 0 and 22.2%) (data not shown). Even if using a different cutoff from that selected, it is not possible to discriminate between true and false positives in any test.
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The results obtained throughout in the child group and when detecting IgM antibodies in adult sera are particularly bleak. In child populations few studies have been carried out throughout the history of TB serodiagnosis. In general, the observed humoral response is lower than that with adult patients (references 3, 9, and 27 and present results), and no differences between infected and sick children have been reported (references 27 and 28 and the present work). Thus, no antigen tested would seem to be useful as a diagnostic tool in child TB patients. In the case of IgM detection in adults, these discouraging results (Table 2) have already been described for three of the four glycolipids (DAT, SL-I, and CF) (7, 20) and for purified proteinaceous antigens (29).
In the present study, the best results were obtained when detecting IgG and IgA in adult TB patients. IgG was comparatively more reactive, giving the highest absorbance values and highest sensitivities (Fig. 1 and Table 2), whereas IgA was found to be more specific. Among the antigens, SL-I showed the best relation between test sensitivity and specificity: 81 and 77.6%, respectively, for IgG, and 66.2 and 87.5% for IgA. Despite it being an exclusive antigen to the virulent M. tuberculosis strains (8), there are only two previous serological evaluations of IgG and IgM antibodies against SL-I (7, 24). Cruaud et al. (7) found, as we did, that the reaction of sera from TB patients was significantly higher than that from healthy controls when detecting IgG antibodies to SL-I, and that IgM reactivity was negligible. However, we achieved a test sensitivity of 81%, in contrast to only 33% reported by those authors. We think this is due to differences in the ELISA procedure, specifically, the low quantity of antigen used by them (only 100 ng per well) while we found 1,000 ng per well for SL-I to be an optimum coating (15). The results obtained by Rojas-Espinosa et al. (24) are discrepant in the sense that they found a high reactivity for the IgM detection. IgA was not tested in either of these previous serological studies using SL-I or in the other studies using the other glycolipids. We have shown, for the first time, that adult TB patients have a specific IgA response against these glycolipids. In comparison with IgG, IgA is less sensitive, but its attractiveness lies in that it is more specific. Thus, by combining the detection of IgA and IgG antibodies against SL-I and adjusting the cutoff value, we have achieved the best relation between sensitivity (67.5%) and specificity (93.7%), taking all the adult populations of this study into account, including the non-TB pneumonia patients.
With both Ig's, elevated test specificity values were obtained in the healthy control group (between 96 and 100%); nevertheless, the specificity drops dramatically when sera from patients with non-TB pneumonia are considered. We have observed that this is a constant in TB serological studies. Reports showing high test specificities (90 and 95%) studied few samples belonging to non-TB pneumonia patients (1, 2). When the same test was carried out with a larger number of non-TB pneumonia patients, the specificity went down markedly (5, 16). The evaluation of new tests using mainly healthy subjects, and with few (if any) patients infected by other agents, is one of the common defects in TB serology studies (31). Unquestionably, the inclusion of this population is crucial for clinical evaluation of new tests, since they are susceptible to being confused with TB patients. For this reason, we have included a large number of non-TB pneumonia patients (38.2% with respect to overall controls) in the present study.
The unspecific hyperglobulinemia associated with some non-TB respiratory diseases (4) and the fact that the majority of adults have been in contact with environmental mycobacteria all their lives could be reasons for the false positive results in some non-TB pneumonia patients. As mentioned, these disappointing results have been borne out by other authors using other antigens. By including such a high percentage of non-TB pneumonia patients in the control population, we were able to choose the most specific antigen-antibody combination. However, in the daily routine of a microbiology laboratory a high percentage of these patients will be correctly diagnosed using specific microbiological tests for each of the remaining infectious agents. Thus, in a clinical setting, the usefulness of the SL-I IgA test will be greater than is shown by the overall results obtained in this study. Nevertheless, a positive result using the SL-I IgA test would not indicate starting an antituberculosis treatment, since it would be necessary to have other clinical or microbiological suggestions of TB.
We think that three strategies could be used to improve the specificity of TB serodiagnosis: first, always using the specific antigens present only in M. tuberculosis; second, avoiding possible antigen contamination during the purification process; and third, preabsorbing the sera either with mycobacteria other than M. tuberculosis, with other bacteria, or with molecules that share epitopes with the specific antigens. Very few studies (17) have analyzed the efficacy of absorbents in diminishing the cross-reactions, and it would be very interesting to investigate this by testing a wide range of them.
It has been clearly accepted that TB patients produce antibodies against more than one antigen (19) and, consequently, a wide spectrum of humoral responses exists in these patients. Thus, some authors (13) and ourselves propound the combination of specific purified antigens to increase the sensitivity of serodiagnosis. In this way SL-I, combined with other specific antigens, could be a useful antigen for inclusion in a TB serodiagnostic test.
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