This is another “someday, in the future” article that made the rounds with the news releases yesterday – where, supposedly, within a few hours of infection, there are significant differences in phagocyte chemiluminescence that allow researchers to differentiate between viral and bacterial infections.<\/p>\n
As usual, the breathless commentary is a little ahead of the actual research results. What the authors did was a data-mining experiment from 69 patients, each of whom had been diagnosed (through standard clinical practice) with either a viral infection, or a bacterial infection. They ran all the polymorphonuclear leukocytes through their assay, recorded several different sorts of chemoluminescence, and then let computer software do a partitioning analysis to determine the most predictive patterns for bacterial and viral infections.<\/p>\n
The software trained to 94.7% accuracy on the “knowns”, and then, when tested on a confusion sample with 18 “unknowns” it was 88.9% accurate.<\/p>\n
So, still not good enough for clinical use as a dichotomous result, but if it were allowed to return an equivocal range that quantified the assay uncertainty, then perhaps it could have a role in clinical practice. In theory, an assay such as this might otherwise reduce additional testing and help reduce the number of viral infections that receive antibiotics.<\/p>\n
“Differentiation Between Viral and Bacterial Acute Infectious Using Chemiluminescent Signatures of Circulating Phagocytes” This is another “someday, in the future” article that made the rounds with the news releases yesterday – where, supposedly, within a few hours of infection, there are significant differences in phagocyte chemiluminescence that allow researchers to differentiate between viral and bacterial infections. As usual, the breathless commentary is a little ahead of the actual … Continue reading “Viral or Bacterial Infection? A Blood Test”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infectious-disease"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7KesJ-ln","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1325"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3003,"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325\/revisions\/3003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emlitofnote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/21517122<\/a><\/p>\n\n