[The potentials of immunological laboratory diagnosis]

Clinicians of different profiles often direct their patients to immunological tests because of a high incidence of various immunopathological syndromes, such as immunodeficiencies and allergic and autoimmune diseases. The efficacy of an immunological study depends on the task of the laboratory verification of the tentative clinical diagnosis, on the disease stage, and planned treatment. Biological material for investigation is collected depending on the task of the study and localization of the pathological process. It is not only the traditional material-blood, but other biological fluids of the organism as well. The choice of an adequate and informative complex of methods is also determined by the tasks of investigation. Special attention is paid now to methods for assessing the cytokine status of the organism. Interpretation of the results is the most intricate step of immunological tests because the notion of "immunological norm" is ambiguous and it is necessary to take account of the individual shifts of immunological parameters in the course of disease.