ArticleJournal of clinical microbiology2026
Comparative study of plasma microbial cell-free DNA sequencing to culture and polymerase chain reaction in pediatric community-acquired pneumonia with parapneumonic effusion or empyema.
Article in Journal of clinical microbiology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Plasma microbial cell-free DNA (mcfDNA) sequencing is a novel diagnostic tool for pediatric complicated community-acquired pneumonia (cCAP). However, rigorous evaluation of real-world mcfDNA performance is lacking. We compared mcfDNA sequencing to a composite reference standard consisting of blood cultures, pleural fluid (PF) cultures, and targeted PF PCRs in children with cCAP requiring pleural effusion or empyema drainage at Children's Hospital Colorado from 2022 to 2024. We calculated positive/negative percent agreement (PPA/NPA), Jaccard similarity index, and theoretical time to pathogen detection. We investigated mcfDNA positivity in pediatric controls without bacterial infections. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis explored potential mcfDNA detection cutoff values to define "true clinical positivity." Across 45 cCAP cases, mcfDNA sequencing detected a probable pathogen in 86.7% versus 8.9% by blood culture, 20.0% by PF culture, and 71.1% by PF PCRs (
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