Papel de la nueva técnica Architect HCV Ag® en el manejo de la hepatitis C en pacientes naïve

Diagnostic performance of hepatitis C core antigen assay to identify active infections: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

“…Heterogeneity is estimated in Figures 2 and 3, where sensitivity, specificity, PLR, and NLR showed substantial heterogeneity ( p < 0.10 and I 2 > 50%). The Galbraith plot (Figure 5a) also shows a significant heterogeneity, where 15 articles stand out for their remarkable impact 30,33,36,38,40,41,60,61,71,76,79,89,96,100,102 . However, no article with a relevant impact on heterogeneity was found using sensitivity analysis (Table ).…”

“…The interdependence analysis between sensitivity and specificity shows a slight skewness towards higher specificity than sensitivity values (Figure 5b), suggesting an inevitable threshold variability, even though the articles included were relatively homogeneous in the cut‐off points of NAATs. The bagplot shows that studies were not clustered together, with nine outliers 30,35,38,40,47,61,69,71,84 . However, the sensitivity analysis did not find any articles with a relevant impact on diagnostic performance measures.…”

“…After evaluating the full text of 204 papers, 75 studies met the inclusion criteria (Figure 1a). 28–102 …”

“…The remaining 29 articles 74–102 were added to the 46 studies from the bivariate analysis to make the univariate analysis (see Table ). Overall, all studies ranged from 2009 to 2022 and were published in English, except three that were available in Spanish, 30 German, 71 and Korean 98 . All studies had a cross‐sectional design except for two longitudinal reports, 46,64 including subjects with hepatitis C and those susceptible to HCV infection.…”

“…Twenty-one studies (28%) were found to have an overall low risk of bias. The risk of bias was high in three articles (4%) for the patient selection domain, 40,86,99 seven studies (9.3%) for the index test domain, 30,66,68,75,82,83,96 and five studies (6.7%) for the flow and timing. 56,66,67,79,88 A similar trend was reported for concern regarding the applicability, where most studies (n = 61, 81.3%) reported low concerns.…”