To evaluate the effect of the five commonly used methods of serologic test for the diagnosis of brucellosis and provide an effective and practical serological detection scheme, and to investigate the significance of serum agglutination test (SAT) titer in assessing the severity of brucellosis.

The serum samples of 137 patients with brucellosis were collected as the experimental group, while the serum samples of 78 non-brucella patients were treated as the control group. The levels of anti-Brucella in patients of the two groups were detected by rose bengal plate agglutination (RBPT), latex agglutination test (LAT), serum agglutination test (SAT), indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (iELISA) and gold immunochromatography assay (GICA). The sensitivity specificity, and Youden index of the above five methods were compared, respectively. The changes of serum C-reactive protein (CRP) in patients with different anti-Brucella were analyzed, and the effect of STA on assessing the severity of brucella was evaluated.

The sensitivity of RBPT, LAT, SAT, iELISA and GICA were 97.08%, 97.81%, 95.62%, 95.62% and 90.51%, respectively; and the specific degrees were 97.44%, 96.15%, 98.72%, 79.49% and 93.59%, respectively; the Youden indexes were 0.95, 0.94, 0.94, 0.75 and 0.84, respectively. There was no significant difference in the levels of CRP among patients with different titer detected by SAT (H = 3.706, P > 0.05).

In clinical practice, the appropriate serological detection method should be selected according to the duration of the disease. RBPT, LAT and SAT all had well detection effect. In order to reduce missed diagnosis, RBPT combined with LAT should be applied for initial screening. The titer detected by SAT does not reflect the severity of the disease.