Simultaneous Detection of Key Bacterial Pathogens Related to Pneumonia and Meningitis Using Multiplex PCR Coupled With Mass Spectrometry

Zhang, Chi; Xiu, Leshan; Xiao, Yan; Xie, Zhengde; Ren, Lili; Peng, Junping

The BP-MS method is a qualitative test, and its high sensitivity may allow asymptomatic carriage to be incorrectly interpreted as an etiological diagnosis. S. pneumoniae is the most commonly pathogenic bacteria carried in the nasopharyngeal cavity. The prevalence of S. pneumoniae carriage differs greatly between countries, ranging from 8.6 to 72%, and is higher in developing countries (Marchisio et al., 2002; Huang et al., 2004; Hill et al., 2006; Neves et al., 2013) . Two recent studies indicate that the colonization rate of S. pneumoniae among healthy children in China is 16.6 to 26.6% (Hu et al., 2016; Pan et al., 2016) , which means that for some cases of pneumonia, S. pneumoniae may not be the causative agent. Therefore, S. pneumoniae in a respiratory tract sample should be interpreted clinically, as is the case with other colonizing microorganisms such as H. influenzae, S. aureus, M. catarrhalis, and N. meningitidis. In this respect, a quantitative molecular test is more helpful in distinguishing etiological infection from asymptomatic carriage (Gadsby et al., 2015) , whereas the BP-MS method can provide guidance on target selection for quantitative tests.