How can candida be diagnosed?
The presence of a candida overgrowth in the body is notoriously difficult to find or to prove. Although various laboratory tests are available, they are not necessarily reliable and can even be misleading. For instance, it doesn’t swim around ‘loose’ in the intestinal tract, but lives burrowed in the gut walls. This means that not only can it go undetected by endoscopy examination, but it will not necessarily even show up in a stool specimen. Antibody tests will only be accurate if the immune system is able to produce candida-specific antibodies, but in many cases the immune system has been weakened to such an extent that it cannot perform this task effectively. An organic acid urine test might be useful as it can detect by-products of yeast produced in the intestinal tract and filtered into the urine. However, it is expensive and is frequently not necessary if an appropriate questionnaire is used, giving information about symptoms and predisposing ‘risk’ factors.
Although various laboratory tests are available, they are not necessarily reliable and can even be misleading. Candida is notoriously difficult to diagnose. For instance, it does not swim around ‘loose’ in the intestinal tract, but lives burrowed in the gut walls. This means that not only can it go undetected by endoscopy examination, but it will not necessarily even show up in a stool specimen. Antibody tests will only be accurate if the immune system is able to produce candida-specific antibodies, but in many cases the immune system has been weakened to such an extent that it cannot perform this task effectively. An organic acid urine test might be useful as it can detect by-products of yeast produced in the intestinal tract and filtered into the urine. However, it is expensive and is frequently not necessary if an appropriate questionnaire is used, giving information about symptoms and predisposing factors. This approach gives a candida ‘score’ indicating the probability and/or seve
