Screening for Bacteriuria in Urological Patients using Reagent Strips

Abstract

A rapid and accurate ward-based method of diagnosing urinary infection would be of value in determining the prescription of antibiotics in pre-operative urological patients. This study describes the sensitivity and specificity of a screening technique based on commercially available reagent strips in the diagnosis of urinary infection. A total of 222 pre-operative samples and 83 post-operative samples was studied to compare the results of formal urine culture and reagent strips.Using a definition of a positive nitrite or a positive leucocyte esterase on the reagent strips as being suggestive of infection, it was found that the strips had a sensitivity of 91% and a specificity of

The urine dipstick test useful to rule out infections. A meta-analysis of the accuracy

“…Univariate logistic regression revealed an association of outliers with lower categories of internal and external validity (internal ≤ 50%: OR = 15.9, 95% CI 1.1 to 233.2, external ≤ 75%: OR = 4.2, 95% CI 1.2 to 15.1). Therefore, studies in the lowest categories of internal or external validity (≤50%) were excluded from further sub-group analysis and meta-regression (n = 12, references: [36,37,44,62,71,72,77,78,82,83,88,89]).…”