Background

Brucellosis is an important zoonotic caused by a gram-negative bacilli. According to Iranian ministry of Health in 2005, the annual reported incidence of human brucellosis is 500,000 cases worldwide and more than 26000 cases in Iran.

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 nephropathy.

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.