Influence of infectious diseases on detection of antibodies to treponema pallidum

The problem of the spread of syphilis is becoming acute due to the rapid increase in the number of initially detected cases of the disease. When analyzing and interpreting the obtained laboratory data, there is always the possibility of obtaining contradictory results, both false positive and false negative, which do not coincide with the clinical picture of the patient. Since in practice false positive results of serological tests for syphilis are detected more often than false negative ones, special importance is attached to the identification and study of the causes of their occurrence. At the analysis stage, the cause may be the cross-reactivity of the test system with various ‘particles’ in the analyzed samples, due to the peculiarities of its design and antigenic composition. For this work, sets of reagents Abbott GmbH (CMIA), Mindray (CLIA), as well as reagents produced by Vector-Best (ELISA) were used. During the study, it was found that one of the possible ‘particles’ leading to cross-reactivity of test systems may be IgG antibodies to cytomegalovirus.