Background
Trichomonas vaginalis is one of the most prevalent non viral sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in developing countries. Although several PCR based diagnostic tests are available, the performance, accuracy and sensitivity of these assays vary. Therefore, we decided to compare the performance of various diagnostic gene targets (18S rRNA, β tublin, pROS21) of T. vaginalis under similar conditions and also compared an in-house developed PCR assay targeting pfoB gene with these methods.
Methods
Samples were obtained from Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Vardhman Mahavir Medical College and Safdarjung Hospital, New Delhi. The DNA so extracted was used as template for PCR amplification using primers targeting pfoB, 18S rRNA, β tublin and pROS21 gene.
Anzeige
Results
The performance (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value) of different PCR assays was compared using DNA isolated from clinical samples. The pfoB PCR showed highest sensitivity (92.31%) and specificity (99.53%) respectively. Our results suggest that though most of PCR based diagnostic assays are highly sensitive and specific, the clinical performance of different primer pairs varies. The positive and negative likelihood ratios were also calculated. The lowest negative likelihood ratio was observed for pfoB PCR.
Conclusion
In the present study we evaluated the diagnostic performance of an in-house developed PCR assay by comparing it with already established PCR methods used for diagnosis of T. vaginalis. Therefore, we propose that, it can be used as a reliable diagnostic test for screening T. vaginalis infection.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.