Towards accurate exclusion of neonatal bacterial meningitis: a feasibility study of a novel 16S rDNA PCR assay.

• DOI: 10.21203/rs.2.17647/v2
• Publication Date: 2020-06-13T23:35:28Z
• Authors: Arthur Abelian; Thomas Mund; Martin Curran; Stuart Savill; Nipa Mitra; Carol Charan; Amanda Ogilvy-Stuart; Hugh Pelham; Paul Dear
• Keywords: Microbiological culture; Neonatal meningitis

Abstract Background: PCRctic is an innovative assay based on 16S rDNA PCR technology that has been designed to detect a single intact bacterium in specimen of cerebro-spinal fluid (CSF). The assay’s potential for accurate, fast and inexpensive discrimination bacteria-free CSF makes it ideal adjunct confident exclusion bacterial meningitis newborn babies where the negative predictive value culture poor. This study aimed stress-test optimize “field conditions” attain clinically useful level specificity. Methods: specificity was evaluated obtained from investigated tertiary neonatal unit. Following interim analysis, method skin antisepsis changed increase bactericidal effect, snap-top tubes (Eppendorf TM ) replaced standard universal containers collection reduce environmental contamination. Results: 90.5% collected into – up 60% containers. had no effect All cultures were clinical cases occurred during study. Conclusions: simple optimization resulted high output. low prevalence means large multi-centre will be required validate sensitivity its value.