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Szu-Fong Lin

Publications and source records attributed to Szu-Fong Lin.

3 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

Neutralizing antibody response and SARS severity.

Using the Taiwan nationwide laboratory-confirmed severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) database, we analyzed neutralizing antibody in relation to clinical outcomes. With a linear mixed model, neutralizing antibody titer was shown to peak between week 5 and week 8 after onset and to decline thereafter, with a half-life of 6.4 weeks. Patients with a longer illness showed a lower neutralizing antibody response than patients with a shorter illness duration (p = 0.008). When early responders were compared with most patients, who seroconverted on and after week 3 of illness, the small proportion (17.4%) of early responders (antibody detectable within 2 weeks) had a higher death rate (29.6% vs. 7.8%) (Fisher exact test, p = 0.004), had a shorter survival time of <2 weeks (Fisher exact test, p = 0.013), and were more likely to be > 60 years of age (Fisher exact test, p = 0.01). Our findings have implications for understanding the pathogenesis of SARS and for SARS vaccine research and development.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Serologic and molecular biologic methods for SARS-associated coronavirus infection, Taiwan.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has raised a global alert since March 2003. After its causative agent, SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV), was confirmed, laboratory methods, including virus isolation, reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), and serologic methods, have been quickly developed. In this study, we evaluated four serologic tests ( neutralization test, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay [ELISA], immunofluorescent assay [IFA], and immunochromatographic test [ICT]) for detecting antibodies to SARS-CoV in sera of 537 probable SARS case-patients with correlation to the RT-PCR. With the neutralization test as a reference method, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were 98.2%, 98.7%, 98.7%, and 98.4% for ELISA; 99.1%, 87.8%, 88.1% and 99.1% for IFA; 33.6%, 98.2%, 95.7%, and 56.1% for ICT, respectively. We also compared the recombinant-based western blot with the whole virus-based IFA and ELISA; the data showed a high correlation between these methods, with an overall agreement of >90%. Our results provide a systematic analysis of serologic and molecular methods for evaluating SARS-CoV infection.

Antibodies, Viral↗