Abstract

Background

Brucellosis is a zoonotic disease with a very wide spectrum of clinical findings. Brucellosis is about 10 times higher in patients with kidney failure (dialysis) compared to population background. Precipitation of immunocomplexes produced by Brucellosis is important in glomerulonephritis. Because the hallmark of glomerular diseases is abnormal protein loss in the urine we have decided to study proteinuria in Brucellosis immunocomplex. The aim of this study was to evaluate probable relationship between brucellosis and glomerulonephritis.

Methods

This is a cross sectional study, performed on 200 patients with a history of the disease for about 1 year, were diagnosed as having chronic brucellosis through those tests Brucella serum agglutination test (SAT) and SAT with 2-mercaptoethanol.The diagnosis was confirmed in 150 patients and by applying Brucella Standard Agglutination Test (SAT) and 2-mercaptoethanol test (2-ME) titers of IgG/IgM and IgG/IgA in two groups of "with proteinuria" and "without proteinuria" was measured.

Results

Both SAT and 2-ME tests test demonstrated that proteinuria increases with rising antibodies titers. In SAT, titer 1/160 was the most frequent, observed in 44% of the patients. In 2-ME test titer 1/40 was observed in 44% of the patients and was the most frequent titer.

Conclusion

Our results clearly demonstrated that in both chronic and acute patients proteinuria increases with raising IgG/IgA and IgM/IgG titers, and therefore can cause nephropathy but chronic Brucellosis or untreated brucellosis is more important because it can permanently damage kidney.