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Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, November 2009, p. 1583-1586, Vol. 16, No. 11
1071-412X/09/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/CVI.00265-09
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Departamento de Moléstias Infecciosas e Parasitárias, Hospital das Clínicas, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo e Laboratório de Investigação Médica-LIM 48, Hospital das Clínicas, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo,1 Laboratório de Soroepidemiologia e Imunobiologia, Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil2
Received 9 June 2009/ Returned for modification 3 August 2009/ Accepted 26 August 2009
Paracoccidioidomycosis is endemic in Latin America, and ca. 80% of all cases occur in Brazil. Little is known about antibody avidity or the evolution of such avidity in the posttherapeutic period for the different clinical presentations of the disease. In the present study, we evaluated 53 patients with paracoccidioidomycosis and calculated the avidity index. Medium- and high-avidity antibodies were found in 79.5% of patients with chronic presentation (n = 39). Among patients with the acute form (n = 14), 57.1% of the antibodies presented low avidity. In the posttherapeutic period, there was a significant increase in antibody avidity in patients presenting with the chronic multifocal form. In our preliminary study, which needs to be confirmed using a larger number of samples, the optimized method for studying antibody avidity detected differences among the clinical presentations of the mycosis and indicated the value of the avidity index as a marker of posttherapeutic evolution of patients with a multifocal chronic form of the disease.
Published ahead of print on 2 September 2009.
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