If the patient has been on treatment (e.g., glucocorticoids), the test may return a false negative result.
[1] It is named for the Norwegian pathologist Morten Ansgar Kveim, who first reported the test in 1941 using lymph node tissue from sarcoidosis patients.
[2][3] It was popularised by the American physician Louis Siltzbach, who introduced a modified form using spleen tissue in 1954.
[4] Kveim's work was a refinement of earlier studies performed by Nickerson, who in 1935 first reported on skin reactions in sarcoid.
[5] A Kveim test may be used to distinguish sarcoidosis from conditions with otherwise indistinguishable symptoms such as berylliosis.