Delayed Diagnosis of Tuberculous Meningitis Misdiagnosed as Herpes Simplex Virus-1 Encephalitis With the FilmArray Syndromic Polymerase Chain Reaction Panel

Carlos A Gomez; Benjamin A Pinsky; Anne Liu; Niaz Banaei

doi:10.1093/ofid/ofw245

Delayed Diagnosis of Tuberculous Meningitis Misdiagnosed as Herpes Simplex Virus-1 Encephalitis With the FilmArray Syndromic Polymerase Chain Reaction Panel

Open Forum Infect Dis. 2016 Dec 7;4(1):ofw245. doi: 10.1093/ofid/ofw245. eCollection 2017 Winter.

Authors

Carlos A Gomez^{1

2}, Benjamin A Pinsky^{1

2}, Anne Liu^{1

3}, Niaz Banaei^{1

2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine, Department of Medicine.
² Department of Pathology, and.
³ Division of Allergy, Immunology and Rheumatology, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, California.
⁴ Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, Stanford University Medical Center, Palo Alto, California.

Abstract

The FilmArray meningitis/encephalitis (ME) panel is a novel syndromic, nucleic acid amplification test for diagnosis of acute meningitis and encephalitis. Emerging data on its performance are concerning for false-positive results. We present a case of tuberculous meningitis misdiagnosed as herpes simplex virus-1 encephalitis with the FilmArray ME panel. Strategies to mitigate erroneous results are discussed.

Keywords: FilmArray panel; encephalitis; meningitis; molecular diagnostics; syndromic panel..