Performance evaluation of the immunochromatographic system using silver amplification for rapid diagnosis of Mycoplasma pneumoniae

Abstract

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is one of the major causative pathogens of atypical pneumonia and can cause severe pneumonia in certain instances. The number of antibiotics that can be used is limited, and early differential diagnosis to rule out typical bacterial pneumonia is recommended for initiating appropriate antibiotic treatment as soon as possible; however, conventional rapid antigen tests are not very sensitive, and a more sensitive rapid kit is therefore required. In this study, we evaluated the performance of a mycoplasma detection kit that uses a silver amplification-based high-sensitivity immunochromatography method and found it to be up to 64 times more sensitive than a conventional rapid antigen kit using the ATCC bacterial strain solution dilution series. With regard to M. pneumoniae DNA copy number and the number of colony-forming units a difference of 101.9 and 160.6 times, respectively, was observed, further indicating extremely high detection sensitivity. Additionally, this method is more useful because the use of a dedicated automated device provides more objective results and also helps avoid inaccurate reporting of results due to manual input.