TY - JOUR T1 - Kinetics of circulating antibody response to <em>Trichomonas vaginalis</em>: clinical and diagnostic implications JF - Sexually Transmitted Infections JO - Sex Transm Infect SP - 561 LP - 563 DO - 10.1136/sextrans-2014-051839 VL - 91 IS - 8 AU - Phuong Anh Ton Nu AU - Paola Rappelli AU - Daniele Dessì AU - Vu Quoc Huy Nguyen AU - Pier Luigi Fiori Y1 - 2015/12/01 UR - http://sti.bmj.com/content/91/8/561.abstract N2 - Objectives Persistence of antibodies against pathogens after antimicrobial treatment is a marker of therapy failure or evolution to a chronic infection. The kinetics of antibody production decrease following antigen elimination is highly variable, and predicting the duration of soluble immunity in infectious diseases is often impossible. This hampers the development and use of immunoassays for diagnostic and seroepidemiological purposes. In the case of Trichomonas vaginalis infection, the kinetics of antibody levels decrease following therapy has never been studied. We thus investigated the clearance of circulating anti-T. vaginalis IgGs after pharmacological treatment in patients affected by trichomoniasis.Methods 18 female patients affected by acute trichomoniasis were enrolled in this study. After metronidazole therapy administration, subjects were followed up monthly up to 5 months, and serum levels of anti-T. vaginalis IgGs were measured by ELISA.Results We showed that a successful therapy is characterised by a relatively fast decline of specific antibodies, until turning into negative by ELISA in 1–3 months. In a few patients we observed that the persistence of anti-T. vaginalis antibodies was associated with an evolution to chronic infection, which may be due to treatment failure or to reinfection by untreated sexual partners.Conclusions Our results describe the direct correlation between the decline of a specific humoral anti-T. vaginalis response and an effective antimicrobial therapy. These findings may facilitate the follow-up approach to circumvent limitations in developing new diagnostic tools and techniques routinely used in microbiology laboratories to assess the presence of T. vaginalis in clinical samples. ER -