Among the measures for the prevention of chickenpox, doctors consider the most correct decision to be vaccinated against such a childhood infection. Thanks to vaccination, a child or an adult who has not been previously ill receives stable long-term protection against the pathogen of chickenpox. The injection will help prevent both the disease itself and its consequences.
Especially often people think about the chickenpox vaccine before pregnancy and in adulthood, when small children appear in the family who can "bring" chickenpox from kindergarten or school. The reason is that in adults, the course of such a disease is quite severe and often leads to serious complications.
But, before you buy a vaccine and go to the vaccination room, you should make sure that the person has not had chickenpox before. But how can you understand whether a particular person had chickenpox in childhood? This will help with the stories of relatives, entries in the medical record or special tests.
Interviewing parents
Having decided to find out if you had chickenpox as a child, first of all you need to turn to the older generation. This is the easiest way to test for chickenpox immunity. The time when the baby had a high temperature, itchy bubbles appeared all over the body, due to which the child was painted with a green dot, it is difficult to forget.
However, such information may be unreliable or missing for the following reasons:
- There are no parents or other close relatives or they do not remember your childhood illnesses.
- You've had chickenpox in a very mild form with a few blisters that your mom might mistake for insect bites without paying much attention to them.
- You are from a large family and your parents do not remember exactly which of the children had chickenpox and which did not get infected.
- You may have had another childhood infection with similar symptoms that your mother mistook for chickenpox.
We study the medical card
If there is no confidence in the information about the transferred chickenpox from relatives or the information itself is absent, you can try to find out everything about childhood diseases in your medical record. Many people keep it at home, so flipping through its pages and finding a record of past infections is a good way to learn about chickenpox that was in childhood.
However, records from the map will not help you figure out anything if:
- The card was lost, for example, during a move.
- The card is kept in the clinic, but they refuse to give it to you.
- The doctor's handwriting that filled your card is unreadable.
We donate blood
Advances in medicine today make it possible to find out exactly whether the body has encountered a particular pathogen before. Therefore, if you need the most reliable way to check immunity to chickenpox, then a blood test can be called just that.
What is the name of the analysis
The examination, due to which antibodies to the varicella-zoster virus are detected, is called an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). It determines two types of immunoglobulins in the patient's blood - M and G. Based on their presence or absence, it is judged about the presence of an active infectious process or a past illness.
Also, the chickenpox virus can be detected using PCR analysis (it is deciphered as "polymerase chain reaction"). Such a study determines the DNA of the virus and allows you to answer whether this pathogen is in the body. It is often prescribed in the presence of an infectious process, when there are doubts or it is necessary to make sure that it was the chickenpox virus that caused the disease.
Where and how to get tested
The determination of antibodies to chickenpox is carried out in many private laboratories, for example, in such well-known laboratories as Gemotest and Invitro. The method is called convenient, highly accurate and very fast, since the result is obtained within a day. Such an analysis costs 760-880 rubles (determination of one type of immunoglobulin without the cost of manipulation of blood sampling).
No special preparation for the analysis is required. It is often taken in the morning on an empty stomach, and on the eve of the test it is advised to avoid fatty and sweet foods, as well as significant physical exertion. Blood for examination is taken from a vein.
Decoding the result
When a person falls ill with chickenpox, antibodies represented by IgM begin to form in his blood from 4-7 days of illness. Over time, IgG antibodies appear in the body of a patient who has had chickenpox, which remain in the blood until the end of life.
Given such data, the analysis can be deciphered as follows:
