Beta 2 Transferrin Test

The test simply helps to distinguish CSF from other watery discharges as when you suffer an injury (e.g. skull fracture) it causes a tear in the membranes covering the brain and spine, or have had brain surgery, CSF may leak out. This also causes a watery discharge from your nose or ear (rhinorrhea or otorrhoea). Test also involves looking for the presence of something which would normally only be found in CSF, such as beta-2 transferrin which is a form of transferrin present in CF but not usually found in blood, nasal secretions or other body fluids.

Unlike any other tests, this doesn’t require any test preparation to ensure the quality of the sample.

If the test results turn out to be positive, there is a requirement to perform high resolution CT (HRCT) to identify area of leak and if its negative but with a strong suspicion, again a recommendation to perform HRCT is a must followed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) cistern gram. Lastly, false positive suggests chronic liver disease or inborn error of glycoprotein metabolism.

This usually requires to collect 0.5 ml of body fluid (nasal, otic, etc.) (0.2 ml minimum). Direct collections may be done with a pipette, syringe, test tube or micro collection device. If a syringe is submitted then the needle needs to be removed and a cap needs to be added to the end of syringe. Patient samples are generally fluids and sometimes also the cotton swabs or gauze which had been used to soak up fluid are equally considered as the appropriate samples. The samples on the swabs and gauze are eluted with small volumes of sterile saline. Positive CSF controls are CSF samples which are submitted for syphilis testing and are to be discarded after completion of that analysis. Whenever possible, the fluid samples are compared with a serum sample obtained from the patient and a human serum sample which shows no abnormal results in laboratory tests is always included as a negative control.