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Toxoplasmosis test positive

There are certain illnesses in which the diagnosis is quite difficult. When the disease has few symptoms, working out what is going on can be puzzling. When the disease causes symptoms which are found in many other illnesses, diagnosing the right one can be troublesome. When the disease has already been successfully destroyed by the body's own immune system, deciding on what caused the illness in the first place is often arduous. So, a common technique doctors use in these situations is to look for the antibodies the body produces to fight off the illness. Antibodies are proteins which attach to the invader so that the body can identify and kill it. When we can't test for the actual invader, we can look for the body's response to that invader.

When a specific antibody is found, it does not necessarily give doctors a clue as to the correct diagnosis. Why is this? It all has to with timing. A good example of this is chicken pox. After a person has chicken pox, the antibodies against chicken pox remain for life. That is why most of us don't get chicken pox twice. However, the fact that there is a raised antibody level tells us nothing about when the infection occurred. In other words, a raised chicken pox antibody level simply means the infection occurred some time in the past, whether that was last month or 40 years ago.

Now comes the technical part. The body makes a lot of different types of antibodies, but two important forms are IgG and IgM. When the body first gets invaded with the infection, it starts making IgM. After the infection has begun to be defeated, the body switches to make IgG. In other words, if IgM is present, it implies the infection has occurred relatively recently (usually within the last couple of weeks). If only IgG is present, the infection could have occurred a month ago or many years ago.

If the raised antibody level was IgM, it implies you were infected recently. If your antibody level was negligible a couple of months earlier and then 12.9, and it was only IgG, it implies one of three things. Either the first test was wrong and you were actually exposed sometime further in the past; the second test was wrong and you are actually negative; or you truly have been exposed to toxoplasmosis in the last several weeks. Certainly, this is something that will need to be followed up with your doctor to determine if there is any risk to your baby. I hope this helps.

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