Health Care > How accurate is the blood test for distinguishing between type One and type Two Herpes?Related Photo
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Not a doctor, but that doesn't mean I don't know what's up.
HerpeSelect is the strain-specific Herpes test used most often in the US. It is made by Focus Labs. Here is the info sheet The answer to your question is located on page 2.
In general, the immunoblot version of the test is more sensitive and more specific (both ratings of certain measures of validity) than the ELISA test. But in both ELISA and immunoblot, the test is more sensitive than it is specific.
That means it casts a wider net and catches more cases, however that means it gets some false positives, too. For example, in tests on Pregnant women, the sensitivity of the HSV-2 test was 100%, but the specificity was only 96.1% (still a damn good score, actually). 100% sensitivity means it picked up all the true cases, but 96% specificity means it missed 4% of true *negatives*.
I hope this is good enough for your purposes because I don't want to go into PVPs and NVPs.
Anyway, it's okay to be a little more sensitive than specific for herpes. Herpes, in the scope of all diseases, is not that huge a deal and you can always test again for verification. It's not as if a positive test is going to get you quarantined nor cause doctors to drag you into emergency surgery (in which circumstances, it's better to be really specific).
And if you were wondering about corss reactivity between the two, I'd go with immunoblot as it is an antibody-specific test that requires pretty accurate matches for binding.
Not a doctor, but that doesn't mean I don't know what's up.
HerpeSelect is the strain-specific herpes test used most often in the US. It is made by Focus Labs. Here is the info sheet The answer to your question is located on page 2.
In general, the immunoblot version of the test is more sensitive and more specific (both ratings of certain measures of validity) than the ELISA test. But in both ELISA and immunoblot, the test is more sensitive than it is specific.
That means it casts a wider net and catches more cases, however that means it gets some false positives, too. For example, in tests on pregnant women, the sensitivity of the HSV-2 test was 100%, but the specificity was only 96.1% (still a damn good score, actually). 100% sensitivity means it picked up all the true cases, but 96% specificity means it missed 4% of true *negatives*.
I hope this is good enough for your purposes because I don't want to go into PVPs and NVPs.
Anyway, it's okay to be a little more sensitive than specific for herpes. Herpes, in the scope of all diseases, is not that huge a deal and you can always test again for verification. It's not as if a positive test is going to get you quarantined nor cause doctors to drag you into emergency surgery (in which circumstances, it's better to be really specific).
And if you were wondering about corss reactivity between the two, I'd go with immunoblot as it is an antibody-specific test that requires pretty accurate matches for binding.
