Candida Antibody
Test Description
Candidiasis, also known as moniliasis and thrush, is caused by the organism
Candida albicans. It affects the mucous membranes, skin, and nails. The organism
is a yeast-like fungus which is normally present in vaginal secretions. Under certain
circumstances, rapid growth of the organism occurs. Such circumstances include:
long-term antibiotic therapy, corticosteroid therapy, pregnancy, oral contraceptives,
diabetes, wearing nonventilated undergarments, and immunocompromised
patients. Oral candidiasis is often noted as the first sign of AIDS. The serologic test
for the Candida antibody is used in conjunction with histologic study and culture to
confirm the diagnosis and is especially useful if the other tests are inconclusive.
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Normal Values Negative for Candida antibodies
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Abnormal Values Titer >1:8 indicates systemic infection
A fourfold increase in titers drawn 10 to 14 days apart indicates an acute infection.
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Possible Meanings of Abnormal Values
Increased
Candida infection
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Contributing Factors to Abnormal Values
• False positive results occur in about 25% of the population.
• Positive results can occur in patients with severe candidiasis of the skin/mucous
membranes.
• False negative results may occur in immunocompromised patients due to their
inability to produce antibodies.
• Hemolysis due to excessive agitation of the blood sample or contamination of the
sample may alter test results.
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Interventions/Implications
Pretest
• Explain to the patient the purpose of the test and the need for a blood sample to be
drawn.
• The patient is to be NPO for 12 hours prior to the test
Procedure
• A 7-mL blood sample is drawn in a red-top collection tube with no gel.
• Gloves are worn throughout the procedure.
Posttest
• Apply pressure at venipuncture site. Apply dressing, periodically assessing for continued
bleeding.
• Label the specimen and transport it to the laboratory.
• Report abnormal findings to the primary care provider.
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Clinical alert
• Inform the patient of the possible need for a second blood sample, should a comparison
of titers be desired.
Candidiasis, also known as moniliasis and thrush, is caused by the organism
Candida albicans. It affects the mucous membranes, skin, and nails. The organism
is a yeast-like fungus which is normally present in vaginal secretions. Under certain
circumstances, rapid growth of the organism occurs. Such circumstances include:
long-term antibiotic therapy, corticosteroid therapy, pregnancy, oral contraceptives,
diabetes, wearing nonventilated undergarments, and immunocompromised
patients. Oral candidiasis is often noted as the first sign of AIDS. The serologic test
for the Candida antibody is used in conjunction with histologic study and culture to
confirm the diagnosis and is especially useful if the other tests are inconclusive.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Normal Values Negative for Candida antibodies
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Abnormal Values Titer >1:8 indicates systemic infection
A fourfold increase in titers drawn 10 to 14 days apart indicates an acute infection.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Possible Meanings of Abnormal Values
Increased
Candida infection
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Contributing Factors to Abnormal Values
• False positive results occur in about 25% of the population.
• Positive results can occur in patients with severe candidiasis of the skin/mucous
membranes.
• False negative results may occur in immunocompromised patients due to their
inability to produce antibodies.
• Hemolysis due to excessive agitation of the blood sample or contamination of the
sample may alter test results.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Interventions/Implications
Pretest
• Explain to the patient the purpose of the test and the need for a blood sample to be
drawn.
• The patient is to be NPO for 12 hours prior to the test
Procedure
• A 7-mL blood sample is drawn in a red-top collection tube with no gel.
• Gloves are worn throughout the procedure.
Posttest
• Apply pressure at venipuncture site. Apply dressing, periodically assessing for continued
bleeding.
• Label the specimen and transport it to the laboratory.
• Report abnormal findings to the primary care provider.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Clinical alert
• Inform the patient of the possible need for a second blood sample, should a comparison
of titers be desired.
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