Two abstracts written by Llusern researchers that discuss the need for better point-of-care diagnostics for UTIs have been published by the peer-reviewed JAC-Antimicrobial Resistance journal.
‘Rethinking UTI diagnosis’, featuring Public Health Wales’ Joanna Diggle as lead author, looked at the results of nearly 81,000 urine samples collected in Cardiff in 2022. This vast study contains some startling statistics, including that only 24% of all samples analysed returned an antimicrobial susceptibility test (AST test). The full abstract is available online here.
The second study, ‘Performance of a novel molecular test designed for point-of-care UTI diagnosis’, evaluated the performance of Lodestar DX and a panel of six uropathogen tests across 149 samples. The study specifically looked at E.coli and found Lodestar DX gave overall sensitivity of 86.2% and specificity of 88.3%. The full abstract is available from JAC-AMR here.
Llusern thanks all the contributors to the two studies and to Public Health Wales.