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Comparison of serum and mucosal antibody responses following severe acute rotavirus gastroenteritis in young children

The development of mucosal immunity is presumed to be the most important marker of rotavirus infection. The practical difficulties of obtaining small-bowel secretions stimulated this study of the antibody response to acute rotavirus infection at other sites. Forty-four infants admitted to the hospital with rotavirus gastroenteritis had serum, saliva, and feces collected at the acute phase (median, 5.5 days), during convalescence (median, 33.5 days), and 4 months later (median, 12.2 weeks). A subgroup of 19 children also had duodenal juice collected in parallel. Rotavirus-specific immunoglobulin G (IgG), IgA, secretory immunoglobulin, and IgM were measured and compared in all samples. The results showed that the estimation of antirotavirus serum IgM, serum IgG, duodenal juice IgA, and duodenal juice IgM by an enzyme immunoassay indicated an immune response to severe primary rotavirus infection in all children. Four months later, the levels of serum IgG and IgA served as the most sensitive markers of the preceding rotavirus infection. The predictive accuracies of immune responses at different sites in relation to a positive IgA immune response in the duodenum were calculated. Fecal IgA predicted duodenal IgA rotavirus antibodies with accuracies of 86% at 1 month and 92% at 4 months. The high sensitivity of serum IgM and IgG in detecting rotavirus infection and the high predictive accuracy of fecal IgA as an indicator of duodenal IgA abrogates the need for duodenal intubation to detect (or monitor) an immune response to rotavirus infection. This finding has important practical implications for epidemiological studies of acute diarrhea in children and in rotavirus vaccine trials.