Evaluation of using urine strip in diagnosis of children's meningitis in Benghazi-Libya

Abstract

Background: Bacterial meningitis is still considered as one of the most dangerous infectious diseases, which numerous complications and high mortality if not diagnosed and treated timely.

Objective: to evaluate the usefulness of urine reagent strip tests in the diagnosis of meningitis Patients and methods: ninety of children aged less than 11 years were included. They clinically suspected to have meningitis from Benghazi children's hospital in the period from February 2017 to April 2018. CSF samples were tested using both Combur-10 urinary reagent strip and CSF microscopy examination as reference standards. Combur-10 was used to estimate ten parameters including protein, glucose, and leukocytes.

Results: The diagnostic accuracy of protein estimation by reagent atrin show 91.7% sensitivity. 100% speciicity for detection of CSF proteins, Glucose reagent strip positivity had 97.5% sensitivity and 72.7% specificity for detection of CSF glucose. Leukocyte esterase positivity by test strip had sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 98.8% for the detection of CSF granulocytes of more than 10 granulocytea/mm. The majority of meningitis were found in children aged less than2 years 191.1%), and incidence of meningitis was found the same percentage in both males and females (41%) for each

Conclusions: our results suggest that reagent strips may be a useful additional resource in the diagnosis of bac terial meningitis, especially when it is difficult to collect a sufficient amount of cerebrospinal fluid or to indicate the initial treatment.