Abstract
BackgroundBacterial meningitis is not rare in post-neurosurgical patients. If patients are not treated promptly, the mortality rate can reach 20 to 50 %. The concentration of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lactate has been reported to be helpful in the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis; however, no systematic evaluations have investigated CSF from a postoperative perspective. In this study, we performed a systematic evaluation and meta-analysis of the efficacy of using CSF lactate concentrations in the diagnosis of post-neurosurgical bacterial meningitis.MethodWe retrieved studies that investigated the diagnostic value of CSF lactate for the diagnosis of post-neurosurgical bacterial meningitis by searching PubMed, EBSCO, the Cochrane Library and ClinicalTrials.gov. All these databases were searched from inception to November 2015. We used Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies (QUADAS), a tool for the quality assessment of diagnostic accuracy, to evaluate the quality of the included studies. The Meta-DiSc 1.4 and Review Manager 5.3 software programs were used to analyze the included studies. Forest plots and summary receiver operating characteristics (SROC) curves were also drawn.ResultsFive studies, involving a total of 404 post-neurosurgical patients, were selected from 1,672 articles according to the inclusion criteria. The quality of the five included studies was assessed using QUADAS, and the related results are presented in tables. The meta-analysis revealed the following diagnostic values regarding CSF lactate for post-neurosurgical bacterial meningitis: a pooled sensitivity of 0.92 (95 % CI 0.85–0.96), a pooled specificity of 0.88 (95 % CI 0.84–0.92 with significant heterogeneity), a diagnostic odds ratio of 83.09 (95 % CI 36.83–187.46), an area under the curve (AUCSROC) of 0.9601, an SE(AUC) of 0.0122, a Q* of 0.9046 and an SE(Q*) of 0.0179.ConclusionThe meta-analysis indicated that the CSF lactate concentration has relatively high sensitivity and specificity for the diagnosis of post-neurosurgical bacterial meningitis and thus has relatively good efficacy.
Highlights
Bacterial meningitis is not rare in post-neurosurgical patients
The meta-analysis indicated that the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lactate concentration has relatively high sensitivity and specificity for the diagnosis of post-neurosurgical bacterial meningitis and has relatively good efficacy
(3) The studies used etiological methods as basic diagnostic tools, which means that a Gram stain or bacterial culture of CSF was considered the basis of the gold diagnostic standard for postoperative bacterial meningitis
Summary
Bacterial meningitis is not rare in post-neurosurgical patients. We performed a systematic evaluation and meta-analysis of the efficacy of using CSF lactate concentrations in the diagnosis of post-neurosurgical bacterial meningitis. Bacterial meningitis is not rare in post-neurosurgical patients and has an incidence of approximately 0.3 to 1.5 % [1]. Post-neurosurgical patients were excluded from Huy’s study [10], and Sakushima did not perform a stratified analysis of the diagnostic value of CSF lactate in postoperative bacterial meningitis [11]. Recent studies have indicated that CSF lactate shows a certain degree of diagnostic accuracy for differentiating between postoperative bacterial meningitis and aseptic meningitis [12]; no systematic evaluations have investigated this aspect
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