Journal article
Accuracy of commercially available c-reactive protein rapid tests in the context of undifferentiated fevers in rural Laos.
- Abstract:
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Background
C-Reactive Protein (CRP) has been shown to be an accurate biomarker for discriminating bacterial from viral infections in febrile patients in Southeast Asia. Here we investigate the accuracy of existing rapid qualitative and semi-quantitative tests as compared with a quantitative reference test to assess their potential for use in remote tropical settings.
Methods
Blood samples were obtained from consecutive patients recruited to a prospective fever study at three sites in rural Laos. At each site, one of three rapid qualitative or semi-quantitative tests was performed, as well as a corresponding quantitative NycoCard Reader II as a reference test. We estimate the sensitivity and specificity of the three tests against a threshold of 10 mg/L and kappa values for the agreement of the two semi-quantitative tests with the results of the reference test.
Results
All three tests showed high sensitivity, specificity and kappa values as compared with the NycoCard Reader II. With a threshold of 10 mg/L the sensitivity of the tests ranged from 87–98 % and the specificity from 91–98 %. The weighted kappa values for the semi-quantitative tests were 0.7 and 0.8.
Conclusion
The use of CRP rapid tests could offer an inexpensive and effective approach to improve the targeting of antibiotics in remote settings where health facilities are basic and laboratories are absent. This study demonstrates that accurate CRP rapid tests are commercially available; evaluations of their clinical impact and cost-effectiveness at point of care is warranted.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 449.9KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12879-016-1360-2
Authors
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- BMC infectious diseases More from this journal
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 61
- Publication date:
- 2016-01-01
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1471-2334
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:601477
- UUID:
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uuid:10f603e9-d24d-489f-a9db-f4e0bbd38956
- Local pid:
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pubs:601477
- Source identifiers:
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601477
- Deposit date:
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2016-02-12
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Phommasone et al
- Copyright date:
- 2016
- Notes:
- © 2016 Phommasone et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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