How to find out if a person has had chickenpox: everything about the analysis of antibodies to chickenpox

Among the measures chickenpox prevention Doctors consider the most correct decision to make inoculation from such a childhood infection. Thanks to the vaccination, a child or an adult who has not previously been ill receives long-lasting protection from the pathogen of chickenpox. The injection will help prevent the disease itself and its consequences.

It is especially common to think about the vaccine against chicken pox before pregnancy and in adulthood, when small children appear in the family who can “bring” chickenpox from kindergarten or school. The reason is that in adults the course of such a disease is quite severe and often leads to serious complications.

But before you buy a vaccine and go to the vaccination room, you should make sure that the person did not have chickenpox before. But how can you understand if a particular person had chicken pox in childhood? This will help the stories of relatives, records in the medical record or special tests.

Having decided to find out if you had chicken pox as a child, you first need to turn to the older generation. This is the easiest way to check for immunity to chickenpox. The time when the baby had a high temperature, itchy bubbles appeared all over his body, because of which the child was painted into a green dot, it is difficult to forget.

However, such information may be unreliable or missing for the following reasons:

• Parents and other close relatives do not have or they do not remember about your childhood illnesses.
• You suffered chickenpox in a very mild form with several vesicles that mom could mistaken for insect bites without paying much attention to them.
• You are from a large family and your parents do not remember exactly which of the children had chickenpox and who did not become infected.
• You could have another childhood infection with similar symptoms that mom took for chicken pox.

If you trust the information about the transferred chickenpox from your relatives or the information itself is missing, you can try to find out everything about childhood diseases in your medical record. For many people, it is stored at home, so looking through its pages and finding a record of past infections is a good option to learn about chickenpox, which was in childhood.

However, the records from the card will not help you find out if:

• The card was lost, for example, during the move.
• The card is kept in the clinic, and they refuse to give it to you.
• The handwriting of the doctor who filled out your card is unreadable.

The examination, due to which antibodies to the varicella-zoster virus are detected, is called enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). He identifies two types of immunoglobulins in the patient's blood - M and G. Based on their presence or absence, the presence of an active infectious process or a previous illness is judged.

Also, the chickenpox virus can be detected using PCR analysis (it is interpreted as a "polymerase chain reaction"). This study determines the DNA of the virus and allows you to answer whether there is this pathogen in the body. It is often prescribed in the presence of an infectious process, when there is a doubt or it is necessary to make sure that the chickenpox virus has become the cause of the disease.

Detection of varicella antibodies is carried out in many private laboratories, for example, in such well-known laboratories as Gemotest and Invitro. The method is called convenient, high-precision and very fast, because the result is obtained in a day. Such an analysis is worth 760-880 rubles (the definition of one type of immunoglobulin without the cost of manipulation of blood sampling).

Special preparation for the analysis is not required. It is often rented in the morning on an empty stomach, and on the eve of the test it is advised to avoid fatty and sweet foods, as well as considerable physical exertion. Blood for examination is taken from a vein.

When a person becomes ill with chickenpox, from 4-7 days of illness, antibodies, represented by IgM, begin to form in his blood. Over time, an IgG antibody appears in the body of the patient who has had the chickenpox and remains in the blood until the end of life.

Given such data, the analysis can be deciphered as follows: