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A new interesting article has been published in J Clin Virol. 2019 Aug;117:37-42. doi: 10.1016/j.jcv.2019.05.011. Epub 2019 May 29. and titled:

Evaluation of in vitro screening and diagnostic kits for hepatitis B virus infection.

Authors of this article are:

Murayama A, Momose H, Yamada N, Hoshi Y, Muramatsu M, Wakita T, Ishimaru K, Hamaguchi I, Kato T.

A summary of the article is shown below:

BACKGROUND: For the diagnosis of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, the detection and quantification of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) and HBV DNA are used. Several kits are available for this purpose, and there is a growing need for the evaluation of these kits because their performance may be affected by HBV genotype- or strain-specific polymorphisms.OBJECTIVES AND STUDY DESIGN: In this study, we used International Standards and the established regional reference panel to evaluate the performance of two HBV DNA quantitative kits, five HBsAg qualitative kits, seven HBsAg quantitative kits and three rapid immune-chromatographic tests for HBsAg.RESULTS: The quantification values of two HBV DNA quantitative kits exhibited excellent correlation. In the evaluation of HBsAg qualitative and quantitative kits, the titers of several specimens in the HBV-positive panel were below the detection limits of a few kits, and the specimens were determined as HBV-negative. Notably, the quantitative kit results exhibited low correlation values. However, when these data were analyzed for each genotype, the correlations improved. These results suggest that the HBsAg quantification data are influenced by HBV genotypes. The novel rapid immune-chromatographic test exhibited the comparable level of sensitivity to the HBsAg quantitative kits.CONCLUSIONS: We evaluated the performance of kits for the detection of HBV infection. The HBV DNA quantification data correlated with an excellent agreement, whereas the HBsAg quantification data were affected by HBV genotype. Such evaluations will be useful for estimating the quality of currently available and new HBV assay kits, and for the quality control of these kits.Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Check out the article’s website on Pubmed for more information:

This article is a good source of information and a good way to become familiar with topics such as: Diagnostics;Genotype;HBV;HBV DNA;HBsAg.

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