Emily M Dawson, José C Sousa-Figueiredo, Narcis B Kabatereine, Michael J Doenhoff, J Russell Stothard
School of Life Sciences, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 2013 OctA sensitive and reliable rapid diagnostic test (RDT) which should have comparable diagnostic performance against reference host serological methods is urgently needed for use in point-of-care (POC) diagnosis of intestinal schistosomiasis in pre school-aged children. The diagnostic accuracy of a RDT incorporating Schistosoma mansoni cercarial transformation fluid (SmCTF) for anti-schistosome antibody detection was evaluated with serum samples from a cohort of children from Uganda: 42 children aged under the age of 3 years and 40 children aged between 3 and 5 years. The infection status of these children had been previously determined by inspection of quadruplicate Kato-Katz faecal smears, a single urine circulating cathodic antigen (CCA) dipstick and antibody titres to S. mansoni soluble egg antigen (SmSEA) with a commercially available ELISA. Upon comparison with quadruplicate Kato-Katz the sensitivity and specificity of the RDT were 75.7% and 31.1%, respectively. When using the SmSEA-ELISA as an alternate reference test, the RDT achieved 81.3% sensitivity and 61.1% specificity. Sensitivity and specificity compared to the urine-CCA test was 74.5% and 32.3% respectively. Sensitivity differed significantly according to age group. The performance of the RDT within this study appeared favourable when compared with the currently-available SmSEA-ELISA. Looking to the future a serological POC test would be particularly promising for use in disease mapping in younger children especially in guiding administration of praziquantel treatment in selective treatment settings.
Emily M Dawson, José C Sousa-Figueiredo, Narcis B Kabatereine, Michael J Doenhoff, J Russell Stothard. Intestinal schistosomiasis in pre school-aged children of Lake Albert, Uganda: diagnostic accuracy of a rapid test for detection of anti-schistosome antibodies. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 2013 Oct;107(10):639-47
PMID: 23976783
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