Modern laboratory diagnosis of syphilis

It is probably hard to find an adult today who does not know what a Wasserman reaction is. Everyone who has at least once sought medical help at a polyclinic or hospital has had this test. The Wasserman reaction has been used for decades as a screening test for syphilis.  There is also the microprecipitation reaction, which is universally done and is very easy to perform.

Unfortunately, all screening tests, including the Wassermann test, have insufficient sensitivity and specificity. For example, they are very often false positive in pregnancy, tuberculosis and various viral infections, oncology, autoimmune diseases. Do you agree that it is not very pleasant to get a positive result from the laboratory, in the absence of syphilis? That is why the whole civilised world is switching to more modern highly sensitive and specific methods of syphilis diagnostics.

One such method is the immunochemiluminescent detection of antibodies in blood to the pale treponema that causes syphilis. This method is well established in European countries and the USA and has replaced traditional screening tests with low reliability. This has reduced the number of false positives for syphilis to almost zero and increased the level of diagnosis of this disease.

In OLYMP branches of laboratories determination of specific antibodies (IgM and IgG) to pale treponema is carried out on a modern automatic analyser Immulite 2000 XPi, with the use of European reagents of Siemens company. The use of such equipment significantly increases the reliability of the obtained results, eliminates the influence of human factor and related errors, reduces the time of examination of patients.  This is why many doctors and patients nowadays prefer the determination of antibodies in the blood to syphilis rather than the Wasserman reaction.