European journal of clinical microbiology & infectious diseases : official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology
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Eur. J. Clin. Microbiol. Infect. Dis. · Mar 2019
Evaluation of Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra performance for pulmonary tuberculosis diagnosis on smear-negative respiratory samples in a French centre.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a worldwide public health concern, including in high-resource countries with a low prevalence of TB. Xpert MTB/RIF assay was developed to improve TB and rifampicin (RIF) resistance detection, but sensitivity remains poor on smear-negative sputum. Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra assay was designed to enhance the sensitivity of TB detection in clinical samples. ⋯ Among samples collected after treatment initiation (n = 12), sensitivity was 100%, without correlation with time to growth detection due to presence of afterglow DNA in samples. In high-resource settings, the Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra test represents a useful tool for pulmonary TB diagnosis, notably for the paucibacillary forms. Moreover, quantitative measurement of Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra could help to predict time to MTB culture positivity and be used as a quality indicator of MTB culture process.