چکیده (انگلیسی):

A recently published model for the serum antibody response to infection appeared well suited for usein statistical analyses of longitudinal serological data. The published model assumed exponential decaywith fixed rates for pathogen and serum antibody kinetics, ignoring any within-host heterogeneity inthe seroresponse. A bi-exponential model shows that there is rapid initial decay followed by a prolongedperiod of persistent low serum antibody concentrations. We propose a small modification of the decaymodel that greatly increases its flexibility by allowing for non-exponential antibody decay.The modified model produces power functions that may be interpreted as a mixture of exponen-tial decay curves, with a mixing distribution representing the relative contribution of many centres ofantibody production to the serum antibody concentration.Fitting the power function decay model to observed longitudinal data for pertussis shows improvedgoodness of fit compared to the exponential decay model, with estimates for the shape parameter (r = 2.2;95% CI (1.7–2.8)) that differ from exponential shape (r = 1).The power function decay model predicts more persistent antibody concentrations in the long term(symptomatic threshold reached >30 years after infection) which, when used in biomarker studies, willlead to lower estimates of seroconversion rates compared to exponential antibody decay.© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-NDlicense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).