Vetnews August 2020: The use of point-of-care antibody and antigen testing in small animal practice

Introduction

Point of care testing for antigen or antibody vastly improves the clinician’s ability to make prompt decisions in clinical practice. The specificity and sensitivity of tests are measurements of accuracy (truthfulness) of the result. Sensitivity relates to correctly identifying patients with disease (few false negative results) whilst specificity relates to correctly identifying patients without disease (few false positives). Interpretation of antigen tests is simple as they only indicate a positive or negative. A positive result on an antibody test may have different meanings for the pathogen under investigation.