Impact of rapid enterovirus polymerase chain reaction testing on management of febrile young infants < 90 days of age with aseptic meningitis

Table 1 Patients characteristics

	Tested group		Untested group
	CSF EV PCR +	CSF EV PCR -		p-value¹
Patients, n	42	28	58
Age in days, median (IQR)	35 (17–48)	39 (33–64)	38 (23–58)	0.133
Gender male, n (%)	24 (57.1%)	15 (53.6%)	34 (58.6%)	0.906
Blood WBC, G/l, median (IQR)	8.9 (7.5–11.2)	8.5 (6.6–11)	10.5 (7.8–13.3)	0.107
CRP, mg/l, median (IQR)	4 (4–13)	6 (4–22)	4 (4–11)	0.344
CSF WBC, cells/μl, median (IQR)	127 (32–496)	17 (10–60)	18 (8–63)	< 0.011²
Mononuclear in %, median (IQR)	80.1 (58.1–94)	85 (59.7–94)	87.1 (75–100)	0.049³
CSF protein, g/l, median (IQR)	0.69 (0.55–0.94)	0.65 (0.43–0.92)	0.58 (0.42 -0.71)	0.031³
CSF glucose, mmol/l, median (IQR)	2.7 (2.5–2.9)	2.8 (2.7–3.1)	2.8 (2.5–2.9)	0.559
Contamination rate overall, n (%)⁴	10 (23.8%)	10 (35.7%)	23 (39.7%)	0.245

Abbreviations: CSF cerebrospinal fluid, EV enterovirus, WBC white blood cells, CRP C-reactive protein, IQR interquartile range;
¹ Pearson Chi-squared test for categorical data, Kruskal-Wallis test for continuous data
² Statistically significant difference between CSF EV PCR + and – patients (p < 0.001) and between CSF EV PCR + and untested group patients (p = 0.011)
³ Statistically significant difference between CSF EV PCR + and untested group patients
⁴ Contamination defined as non-relevant bacterial growth in culture from blood, CSF and/or urine

ISSN: 1471-2431