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Testing of Virus Levels in the bloood -- Dr Chia.

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
If that's the case, then why does Dr Chia test virus levels in the blood and state that certain titer scores represent an infection?

The antibody titer blood tests that Dr Chia uses detect the anti-enterovirus antibodies that the immune system makes against the virus. All antibody titer tests do not detect the virus itself, but measure the level of antibody response from the immune system. It is assumed that the higher the antibody response, the more virus is present, somewhere in the body.

Blood tests that detect enterovirus infections directly include the PCR test. Dr Chia has found the PCR blood test to be unreliable for chronic enterovirus, simply because there are such low levels of enterovirus floating around in the blood in the case of these chronic infections. This is what it says on the Enterovirus Foundation website: see this page.

If however you instead use PCR on enterovirus-infected tissues (like infected stomach tissues or muscle tissues), that works fine, and will readily detect enterovirus, because there is a lot of enterovirus present in such infected tissues. But PCR will not work on the blood, because you don't find much enterovirus there, in chronic infections.


Did you attend your appointment with Dr Chia today, or is that still coming later in the afternoon?
 

eljefe19

Senior Member
Messages
483
@Jesse2233 I'm also curious what Dr. Chia said, and what EV and co-infections have you tested positive for? I still cannot rule out EV as a cause of my CFS, although none of my titers were too high except for CVA (apparently not a usual cause of CFS).