SynthesisScientific reports2021
Rats sniff out pulmonary tuberculosis from sputum: a diagnostic accuracy meta-analysis.
Synthesis in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Remote Medical Scent Detection of Cancer and Infectious Diseases With Dogs and Rats: A Systematic Review.Integrative cancer therapiesPooled it
- Viral infections alter the human salivary volatilome.mSphere · 2026Article
- Investigation of sputum volatiles to classify active tuberculosis: A pilot study.Tuberculosis (Edinburgh, Scotland) · 2026Article
- Use of trained African giant pouched rats as a predictor of clinical diagnosis of pulmonary TB.Public health action · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Thinking Small, Stinking Big: The World of Microbial Odors.The Journal of infectious diseases · 2024Article
- Increased tuberculosis case detection in Tanzanian children and adults using African giant pouched rats.BMC infectious diseases · 2024Article
- The use of rats to detect drug-resistant TB.Public health action · 2023Article
- Differential Diagnosis of Abdominal Tuberculosis in the Adult-Literature Review.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In Sub-Saharan Africa, African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys gambianus) are trained to identify TB patients by smelling sputum. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the data to see if this novel method is comparable to traditional laboratory screening and detection methods like Ziehl-Neelsen stain-based assays (ZN) and bacterial culture. The search and data processing strategy is registered at PROSPERO (CRD42019123629). Medline via PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library databases were systematically searched for the keywords "pouched rat" and "tuberculosis". Data from 53,181 samples obtained from 24,600 patients were extracted from seven studies. Using sample-wise detection, the sensitivity of the studies was 86.7% [95% CI 80.4-91.2%], while the specificity was 88.4% [95% CI 79.7-93.7%]. For patient-wise detection, the sensitivity was 81.3% [95% CI 64.0-91.4%], while the specificity was 73.4% [95% CI 62.8-81.9%]. Good and excellent classification was assessed by hierarchical summary receiver-operating characteristic analysis for patient-wise and sample-wise detections, respectively. Our study is the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the above relatively inexpensive and rapid screening method. The results indicate that African giant pouched rats can discriminate healthy controls from TB individuals by sniffing sputum with even a higher accuracy than a single ZN screening.
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