A comparison of conventional tube test and gel technique in evaluation of direct antiglobulin test

In vivo coating of red cells by antibody and/or complement is detected using various sensitive techniques, however most hospitals even today rely on the conventional tube technique (CTT). We compared the performance of the CTT and recently introduced gel test (GT) in the evaluation of direct antiglobulin test (DAT). The CTT and GT were first compared using in-house prepared control cells. The polyspecific DATs were performed simultaneously by CTT and GT on 170 consecutive blood samples. Positive samples were further tested for monospecific IgG and C3d by both techniques. GT demonstrated stronger agglutination scores (60 vs. 43) compared to CTT using control cells. The sensitivity and specificity of the GT was 98.4 and 95.2%, respectively as compared to CTT for polyspecific DAT. Discordance between the two test systems was seen in 6/170 patients. Of these, 5 were missed by CTT while GT failed to detect in vivo coating in only I case. The agreement between two methods of DAT was 96.4% (K = 0.926) using polyspecific AHG and 95.7% (K = 0.379) with monospecific anti-IgG. We conclude that GT is a better alternative to CTT for detecting red cell bound antibodies in various clinical conditions.