Detection of cytomegalovirus antibody with two commercially available assays, an indirect hemagglutination test and an enzyme immunosorbent assay.

By the use of two reference procedures, an indirect hemagglutination assay and a complement fixation test, the presence or absence of cytomegalovirus (CMV) antibody was determined for 221 human sera. Ninety-nine sera (44.8%) were found to contain CMV antibody. The remaining 122 sera (55.2%) lacked detectable CMV antibody. These same sera were then analyzed by two recently introduced, commercially available CMV antibody assays, an indirect hemagglutination test (IHA-c; Cetus Corp., Emeryville, Calif.) and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA; M. A. Bioproducts, Walkersville, Md.). With the results of the reference procedures as true evidence of the presence or absence of CMV antibody, the sensitivity of the IHA-c was found to be 100%; the specificity was 98.4%. The sensitivity of the ELISA was also 100%; the specificity was 96.7%. The overall accuracies of these procedures were 99.1 and 98.2%, respectively. Time and motion studies revealed the IHA-c procedure to be faster and technically less demanding than the ELISA procedure.