› Forums › Herpes Questions › Can IGG antibodies drop to negative levels if HSV-2 is latent long enough? › Reply To: Can IGG antibodies drop to negative levels if HSV-2 is latent long enough?
You’ve had such long symptoms, has swab testing been done of all these outbreaks? I may have missed that if you said it and I certainly assume that it has been done. If you had a positive swab test from a lesion, yes, that would trump a negative IgG test.
The negative and low positive values that you obtained are within the range of normal variation on this test – I don’t find the changes to be remarkable.
If antiviral medicine is not being used and someone is truly infected, I would expect their IgG levels to climb though for some people, they stay low
The western blot requires that four antibody proteins be present in the sample to call it positive -the IgG positive is only based on the presence of one antibody protein which is one reason that the western blot is so much more accurate than the IgG test. the western blot looks for all 16 antibody proteins, instead of the IgG test which only looks for one.
I think you should wait another week or two before doing the western blot test, just to be really certain that the medicine is not interfering with the result.
Terri