ArticleThe Pan African medical journal2021
Assessment of malaria diagnostic methods and treatments at a Ghanaian health facility.
Article in The Pan African medical journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 8 citations in OpenAlex.
- Assessing the influence of rapid diagnostic test (RDT) accuracy on malaria misdiagnosis and antimalarial resistance in Nigeria.Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) · 2025Review
- Plasmodium vivax: the potential obstacles it presents to malaria elimination and eradication.Tropical diseases, travel medicine and vaccines · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionit has been more than a decade since the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended parasitological confirmation of malaria before treatment begins. Light microscopy and rapid diagnostic tests are currently being used for diagnosing malaria in routine clinical care settings. Many clinicians have however raised questions about the competencies of laboratory staff who perform these tests and the performance of these diagnostic methods. This study aimed at assessing the performance of microscopy and two rapid diagnostic test kits in the hands of routine laboratory staff compared to expert microscopy as well as assess the performance of clinical diagnosis.
methodsthis was a cross sectional study involving 799 participants of all ages who visited the out patient department of the University of Cape Coast Hospital with symptoms suggestive of malaria.
resultswhen the different methods were compared to expert microscopy, the rapid diagnostic test kits had the highest sensitivities, Wondfo 94.83% (95% CI: 85.62-98.20) and CareStart 91.38 (95% CI: 81.02-97.14). Microscopy by laboratory staff had a sensitivity of 68.79 (95% CI: 55.46-80.46) whilst clinical diagnosis had the lowest sensitivity of 17.24 (95% CI: 8.59-29.43). Cohen´s kappa coefficient was used to measure the level of agreement of the methods with expert microscopy. Microscopy by laboratory staff, CareStart and Wondfo showed substantial measures of agreement (k = 0.737, 0.683, and 0.691 respectively).
conclusionthese findings suggest that clinical diagnosis is highly unreliable whilst rapid diagnostic tests and microscopy performed by routine laboratory staff could be trusted by clinicians as reliable diagnostic methods.
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