Hi Community, I'm posting a question completely out of curiosity, as I have not found much information on the subject matter.
My question(s) is:
1.) During (or immediately after) an active outbreak, a person's antibody levels should be higher, thus easier to pick up on the current IgG blood tests such as HerpesSelect. However has there been any research or knowledge as to what antibody levels become or "settle down" to when you're in between outbreaks? As in will someone still test positive or will they perhaps slip into the negative or equivocal category?
2.) Has anyone in the community ever had a positive outbreak, correlated with a positive HerpesSelect and then later tested (for whatever reason) and your numerical values for the test was equivocal or negative. I'm very interested especially if people have ever tested negative or have had changing results with the HerpesSelect (Positive/Negative/Equivocal/Negative...etc)
3.) For what I can find, these results are much more likely with HSV-1 as HerpesSelect has a sensitivity of around 91-95% for HSV1 and about 96-98% for HSV-2. Meaning that approximately 1/10 times it may not pick up a persons HSV-1 however, it is very unlikely 1/20 to not pick up HSV-2 especially if you've had the test multiple times at the proper time intervals (3-4 months after a possible exposure)
I personally could not find any information about antibody levels, as in with HerpesSelect would you stay above the 3.5 ratio value if you've never had an outbreak AND if you were positively infected or would it be lower. Also there's also the idea that there's some cross reactivity from HSV-1 to HSV-2 results for HerpesSelect along with the higher chance of false positives (again why many health professionals don't usually recommend testing without "high risk" behavior or outbreaks) so if anyone can comment on their experiences, which turned out to be false positives and how you went around to solve it, it would be a great benefit to the community as many people, although tested negative, are still riddled with guilt and uncertainty. Thanks again community for your time, everyone who comments is a great help!