Abstract
This study aimed to determine the subjects for bacterial multiplex polymerase chain reaction (mPCR) testing and to interpret the mPCR test results based on patients’ clinical symptoms and diagnoses. The medical records of 710 pediatric patients who underwent a bacterial mPCR test were retrospectively reviewed. Clinical characteristics and mPCR test results were compared between patients with positive (n = 199) and negative mPCR test results (n = 511) and between patients with invasive pathogens (n = 95) and toxigenic pathogens (n = 70). Positive mPCR test results were significantly associated with older age (p < 0.001), diagnosis of acute gastroenteritis (p = 0.021), presence of hematochezia (p < 0.001), and absence of cough (p = 0.004). The diagnosis of acute gastroenteritis (p = 0.003), presence of fever (p = 0.027) and diarrhea (p = 0.043), and higher C-reactive protein levels (p = 0.025) were significantly associated with the identification of invasive pathogens in patients with positive mPCR test results. Thus, selective bacterial mPCR testing should be performed based on the patients’ clinical symptoms and diagnoses, and the results should be interpreted in consideration with identified pathogens.
Highlights
Infectious acute gastroenteritis (AGE) is caused by various viruses, bacteria, and parasites [1]
Bacterial multiplex polymerase chain reaction (mPCR) tests were performed in 814 pediatric patients
For 199 (28.0%) patients, at least one of the pathogenic bacteria was identified by performing a bacterial mPCR test (Table 1)
Summary
Infectious acute gastroenteritis (AGE) is caused by various viruses, bacteria, and parasites [1]. Each of these pathogens causes various gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms and some of them induce similar GI symptoms [1]. There have been several studies on mPCR tests to identify GI pathogenic bacteria using stool samples [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11], most of them evaluated the performance of mPCR tests on stool samples as requested by clinicians, without considering the patients’ GI symptoms or clinical diagnoses [7,8,9,10,11].
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