Treatment success of chronically infected Chagas disease patients is laborious and a positive prognosis often is made only after repetitive serological and/or parasitological examinations with continuous negative results. Recently, we have developed a non-conventional flow-cytometric method in order to detect immunoglobulin G antibodies against live trypomastigote forms of Trypanosoma cruzi and showed its usefulness in the prognosis of treatment success. In the present study, we investigated the performance of flow-cytometric anti-live trypomastigote IgG antibodies (FC-ALTA) and flow-cytometric anti-fixed epimastigote IgG antibodies (FC-AFEA), as well as conventional serological methods, for early monitoring of benznidazole treated Chagas disease patients, e.g. 5years after treatment. The analysis of individual FC-ALTA reactivity along the titration curve before and after treatment, we were able to show, that between 4% and 13% of treated patients under evaluation presented with reduced serological reactivity and segregated from the other patient groups. Similar results were obtained with semi-quantitative, conventional indirect hemagglutination or indirect immunofluorescence. Our data therefore suggest that the combined use of conventional and non-conventional serological methods could provide more suitable cure criteria in early post-therapeutic prognosis of Chagas disease.
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