In recent years, serologic markers for diagnosis and classification of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have been used in human medicine. Perinuclear, antineutrophil, cytoplasmic antibodies (p-ANCA) are the most important of these markers. Because of their similar pattern of fluorescence, antinuclear antibodies (ANA) could cause misleading interpretations. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the use of an indirect fluorescent antibody test to detect p-ANCA in dogs with IBD, to compare the presence of p-ANCA in dogs with IBD with the presence of the same antibodies in other dogs, and to analyze the presence of ANAs in the p-ANCA-positive samples. Using a 110 dilution as a cutoff point, a sensitivity of 0.34 and a specificity of 0.86 was obtained when dogs with IBD were compared with the other groups as a whole, and specificity increased to 0.94 when dogs with IBD were compared with animals with other chronic gastrointestinal disorders. The lowest specificity value, 0.76, was obtained when the group of dogs with IBD was compared with that of dogs with different inflammatory and infectious disorders. Globally, 78 dogs were positive for p-ANCA when the cutoff was 110. Only 1 dog from these 78 animals was also seropositive to ANA. The results suggest that 1) detection of p-ANCA might be included in the IBD diagnostic protocol as another test to differentiate between this disease and other digestive diseases with similar clinical signs, and 2) most p-ANCA-positive dogs are not ANA positive.
Results indicated that circulating pANCA are present in some dogs with IBD or intestinal lymphoma. However, pANCA detection does not seem to be useful for distinguishing dogs with IBD from dogs with intestinal lymphoma.
Most dogs in this study affected with PLE, PLN, or both had positive results for pANCAs before clinicopathologic evidence of disease was detected. Thus, pANCAs may be useful as an early noninvasive test of disease in SCWTs.
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