Viral culture techniques are considered the gold standard for virus isolation. Classic cell culture techniques require a two to three week incubation period. The rapid cell culture method requires an incubation period of 3 days. Because only active infections of HHV-6 are of concern to clinicians, only the methods that are able to distinguish between active and latent viral infections are of clinical significance and value. Serology Serology testing is not an effective method for detecting active HHV-6 infections.
Serologic testing detects the presence of antibodies in serum.
A titer is a relative measurement of the amount of antibody in the sample, but in no way indicates a high or low positive when performed on a single sample. A positive result for IgG indicates a previous infection with HHV-6. This result has no correlation to active HHV-6 infections. While these assays are capable of detecting viral DNA, the presence of viral DNA does not indicate an active infection. This style of assay also suffers from a high false negative rate due to inhibitors present in patient samples.