title: Correlation between the results of a histopathological examination and the detection of abnormal brain fibrils in the diagnosis of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
abstract: A statistical comparison was made between the results of the statutory neurohistopathological method for the post mortem diagnosis of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and the detection of abnormal brain fibrils (SAF). A total of 773 suspect cases was examined by both methods; it comprised 531 animals born before the feeding of ruminant-derived protein to ruminant species was prohibited and 242 born after the ban. The relative sensitivities and specificities of the methods were calculated for the diagnosis of clinically suspected BSE. The agreement between the results of the methods was excellent for 331 of the cases born before the ban and for all the cases born after it. In these cases the samples were not autolysed. For the 200 cases in which autolysis was recorded there was poor agreement between the diagnostic methods and this was attributed to an apparently reduced specificity of the histopathological diagnosis in the autolysed material. Despite the potentially greater specificity of fibril detection in the diagnosis of scrapie-like disease, this study indicates that a reliance on fibril detection alone may result in some false negative diagnoses, probably owing to the inadequate sampling of the tissues.
authors.affiliation: Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Tolworth, Surbiton, Surrey.
authors.forename: G A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Wells
authors.forename: A C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Scott
authors.forename: J W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Wilesmith
authors.forename: M M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Simmons
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Matthews
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology* / Q000648:ultrastructure; D002417:Cattle; D016643:Encephalopathy, Bovine Spongiform / Q000473:pathology*; D008854:Microscopy, Electron; D011180:Postmortem Changes; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity