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Comparison of a rapid immunoassay for antibodies to the C6 antigen with conventional tests for antibodies to Borrelia burgdorferi in dogs in Europe

¹ Clinic for Small Animal Internal Medicine, Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 260, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland
² Institute of Veterinary Bacteriology, Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 260, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland

Correspondence: E-mail for correspondence: bgerber{at}vetclinics.uzh.ch

A commercial immunoassay for antibodies to the C6 antigen of Borrelia burgdorferi was evaluated against an IgG in-house ELISA in combination with a Western blot assay to examine 104 samples of serum from 53 healthy Bernese mountain dogs, which were suspected to have a breed predisposition to Lyme borreliosis, and 55 samples from 30 healthy large-breed longhair dogs. The two test methods correlated in 125 (79 per cent) of the samples with an agreement of kappa=0·571 (P<0·001). In comparison with the in-house ELISA in combination with a Western blot, the sensitivity and specificity of the C6 test were 81 per cent and 77 per cent respectively. The agreement between the tests was better with the samples from the Bernese mountain dogs (k=0·681) than with the samples from the control dogs (k=0·347).