i have not used vibrant wellness for any of my testing
they did not come out of my thorough deep dive into which test lab to use for my tickborne disease tests as one of the top tier labs - more somewhere in the middle or towards the bottom.
the main reasons being
1, they do not have a published proper validation study on their tick borne disease panel ( that i could find )
this is the first thing i look for - as thsiis the standard way a lab test is evaluated for diagnostic value in the industry. They do have a paper on Lyme testing ( borrelia only ) but its seems to be largely a combination of Elisa and western blot approaches on a proprietary silicone chip.
2, the make their own tests in house exclusively - so they do not link to the manufacturers validation studies as do test houses like Armin labs - who only use approved manufacturers existing tests.
But Vibrant do not publish how well their in house tests perform - see above - so its very hard to evaluate them objectively.
basically "no data"
3, the tick born disease tests seem to be a huge multiplex array ( tests for many different pathogens all using the same method on one single test chip. This is great if you go to market based on $ cost per pathogen tested - but this is in contrast to how many of the best labs test for tick born diseases - who typically test with different types of test technologies for each pathogen - previous research shows different test types work better for different pathogens. so this puts the Vibrant's one method fits all methodology into question.
4, its mostly an antibody based test - that we know this has many limitations in chronic infections - because its measuring an indirect effect of infection ( ie how is the hosts immune system responding?- rather than actual pathogen presence) .
there is a PCR element - but PCR for co-infections like bartonella on blood are very poor sensitivity - due to lack of homogeneous presentation of infected cells.
5, the tick born disease tests seem to be a dried blood spot on a paper card type sample - this is great for convenience - just a pin prick at home by the patient - no doctors visits, phlebotomy nurse charges, tubes of blood to send in the post etc - so low friction approach direct to the consumer. But we have not seen any other respected labs take this approach - so we do not know how well it works for co-infection testing.
overall its a leap of faith because we do not have data to evaluate the companies approach.
the fact that they don't provide it and instead go to market on the $ per pathogen and ease of use benefits is not a good sign in my view (in the absence of rigorous validation).
overall - the main issues with both antibody and PCR methods on straight blood is sensitivity.
this mainly translates to high numbers of false negative results.
(i can only imagine v low volume of blood that is then dried and posted only makes this worse)
this means we cannot ascribe value to negative results, so, with that in mind if one were to look at it as a cheap test, from which you were prepared to disregard any significance of negative results from - but that positive results were potentially significant - they one could reason there might still be some value there - if for instance it threw up some positives that fitted well with symptoms. - but any negatives results could not safely be taken as meaning other infections were absent
i say positive antibody results may be possibly significant - as the fact is some people continue to make antibodies to chronic infections for years after symptoms have resolved - no one currently knows if this is due to just some feature of the immune system that continues to pump out antibodies - or if in fact the host still carries some low level of infection that is partly under control from a symptoms perspective - but is still stimulating the host to make antibodies. so, in this circumstance, even strong positive antibody results are not cut and dried. so they may simply mean once had this infection - rather than still have this infection
there is also the cross reactivity issue to consider - eg EBV, Toxo etc and lyme antibodies
in your specific case - as someone with some ongoing immune deficiency - then the likelihood of false negatives ( infection being present but test reporting negative) would seem even higher - and the diagnostic value of negative results becomes even lower.
the PCR element is perhaps clearer - as it is at east a direct test method
here i think you can safely assume positive results are true positive ( false negatives are still an issue due to the sensitivity issues ) but at least one can say if the PCR comes back positive that is 99% likely to be a true positive.
so the summary of the summary
is
-the negative IgM/IgG will probably mean almost nothing
-the negative PCR will probably mean almost nothing
-the positive IgM/IgG might or might not mean anything
-the positive PCR will probably mean something
in which case you may be better doing straight PCR - or targeted tests for each pathogen of interest
we all want a simple affordable and black and white multiplex test - but we are currently many years from having the technology to do it - perhaps some form of 'omincs, or crispa based technology will get us there in the future.....