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Are there any blood biomarkers that could be reviewed to check on progress in treating fungal infections or growth?

Unfortunately, functional blood chemistry reports don’t address fungal infection or overgrowth at this time, however there are specialty biomarkers that can be monitored.

You may be able to monitor a variety of biomarkers including fungal antigen and antibody levels. You can also monitor D- and L-arabinitol and their ratios to monitor candida overgrowth (Arendrup 2010).

Measurable levels of alcohol or acetaldehyde in the blood following a glucose challenge in the absence of alcohol intake may detect fermentation due to Candida overgrowth (Gaby 2011). Urine organic acid testing may detect Candida overgrowth as well (Kohlstadt 2012).

The following table and references may be helpful as well (Bouza 2020).

Biomarkers of invasive candidiasis

  • Mannan-Anti-mannan
  • CAGTA
  • 1-3-ß-DGlucan
  • Nucleic acids
  • Nanodiagnostic T2Candida

Biomarkers of invasive aspergillosis

  • Galactomannan (Blood, BAL)
  • Aspergillus Lateral Flow Assay
  • 1-3-ß-DGlucan
  • Nucleic acids

References

Arendrup, M C et al. “Detection of candidaemia in patients with and without underlying haematological disease.” Clinical microbiology and infection : the official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases vol. 16,7 (2010): 855-62. doi:10.1111/j.1469-0691.2009.02931.x

Bouza, E et al. “Biomarkers of fungal infection: Expert opinion on the current situation.” Revista espanola de quimioterapia : publicacion oficial de la Sociedad Espanola de Quimioterapia vol. 33,1 (2020): 1-10. doi:10.37201/req/2260.2019 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)().

Gaby, Alan R. Nutritional Medicine. Fritz Perlberg Publishing, 2017.

Kohlstadt, I. (2012). Advancing Medicine with Food and Nutrients, Second Edition. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

Malhotra, S., et al. "Recent diagnostic techniques in mycology." Journal of Medical Microbiology & Diagnosis 3.3 (2014): 1.

Ostrosky-Zeichner, Luis. “Invasive mycoses: diagnostic challenges.” The American journal of medicine vol. 125,1 Suppl (2012): S14-24. doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2011.10.008