Evaluation of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid combined with the loop-mediated isothermal amplification assay in lower respiratory tract infections

Zaiqiang Wang; Yu Zang; Yanjun Gao; Luyao Han; Hongwei Lin; Yongheng Gao; Min Chen; Yurou Liu; Qian Zhang; Enqing Fu

Evaluation of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid combined with the loop-mediated isothermal amplification assay in lower respiratory tract infections

Am J Transl Res. 2020 Jul 15;12(7):4009-4016. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Zaiqiang Wang¹, Yu Zang¹, Yanjun Gao¹, Luyao Han¹, Hongwei Lin¹, Yongheng Gao¹, Min Chen¹, Yurou Liu¹, Qian Zhang¹, Enqing Fu¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Air Force Medical University Xi'an 710038, P. R. China.

PMID: 32774754
PMCID: PMC7407691

Abstract

The clinical application of the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay has been problematic because of conflicting results obtained from the LAMP assay and bacterial culture. In order to eliminate the interference of oral microorganisms and more accurately evaluate the diagnostic performance of the LAMP assay, we utilized bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) as a sample to test whether the LAMP assay and bacteria culture yielded similar results. A total of 1092 BALF samples from patients with suspected lower respiratory tract infections were collected. For each sample, parallel studies using both bacterial culture and the LAMP assay were carried out. We were the first to utilize BALF as a sample to study the consistency between the LAMP assay and bacterial culture results. The present study demonstrated that the positive rate from the LAMP assay was higher than that from bacterial culture, and the two methods had a better consistency than previously reported.

Keywords: Loop-mediated isothermal amplification; bacterial culture; bronchoalveolar lavage fluid; lower respiratory infections; pathogens.