DENGUE IGM DETECTION A COST EFFECTIVE ASSAY

Purpose Dengue is an acute febrile illness caused by Dengue virus. IgM antibodies appear early in the course of the disease. The most challenging problem related with patient management in dengue fever is rapid and accurate diagnosis. Our purpose is to compare the diagnostic efficacy of various ELISA kits like, dengue IgM capture ELISA (Panbio) and Dengue IgM indirect ELISA (Novatec) with reference to dengue IgM capture ELISA (NIV Pune kit).Materials and Methods Hundred samples collected from clinically suspected cases of dengue fever in tertiary care Hospital were used in this study. Evaluation of dengue diagnostic tests, dengue IgM capture ELISA (NIV Pune kit), the Dengue IgM Capture ELISA (Panbio), Dengue IgM indirect ELISA (Novatec) were done to determine dengue IgM antibodies. Results ELISA by NIV Pune kit ,Panbio and Novatec showed dengue IgM as positive in 54,53 and 52 samples respectively. ELISA by Panbio and Novatec were compared taking NIV Pune kit as the reference. The estimated specificity was 100 in both Panbio ELISA and Novatec. The sensitivity of Panbio ELISA was 98.14 and that of Novatec ELISA was 96.29 . The positive predictive value was 100 in both. The negative predictive value was 97.87 and 95.83 in Panbio ELISA and Novatec ELISA respectively.Conclusions The present study established that both panbio, and Novatec ELISA tests were of almost equal efficacy with accuracy of 99 and 98 respectively. Since ELISA by Novatec is of lower cost and took lesser time to perform it is preferable.