Detection of cytomegalovirus antibody with two commercially available assays, an indirect hemagglutination test and an enzyme immunosorbent assay

Abstract

By the use of two reference procedures, an indirect hemagglutination assay and a complement fixation test, the presence or absence of cytomegalovirus (CMV) antibody was determined for 221 human sera. Ninety-nine sera (44.8%) were found to contain CMV antibody. The remaining 122 sera (55.2%) lacked detectable CMV antibody. These same sera were then analyzed by two recently introduced, commercially available CMV antibody assays, an indirect hemagglutination test (IHA-c; Cetus Corp., Emeryville, Calif.) and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA; M. A. Bioproducts, Walkersville, Md.). With the results of the reference procedures as true evidence of the presence or absence of CMV antibody, the sensitivity of the IHA-c was found to be 100%; the specificity was 98.4%. The sensitivity of the ELISA was also 100%; the specificity was 96.7%. The overall accuracies of these procedures were 99.1 and 98.2%, respectively. Time and motion studies revealed the IHA-c procedure to be faster and technically less demanding than the ELISA procedure.