Why antibiotics against Chlamydia pneumoniae for treatment of atherosclerotic disease could fail

Abstract

I will show you some data that might suggest that antibiotic treatment could fail for the treatment of C. pneumoniae in atherosclerotic lesions. First of all when you summarize the literature there is a striking discrepancy between PCR and immunocytochemistry results. We have summarized here 12 studies of 239 patients in which both PCR and ICC were used on the material of the same patient (Figure 1). What you see if you use a gold standard of either positive in PCR or immunocytochemistry, then PCR alone detects only 50 % of all the patients having C. pneumoniae and immunocytochemistry detects over 80%. Usually PCR is considered a much more sensitive technique than immunocytochemistry. So why is PCR less sensitive than immunocytochemistry?