Evaluation of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid combined with the loop-mediated isothermal amplification assay in lower respiratory tract infections.

The clinical application of the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay has been problematic because of conflicting results obtained from the LAMP assay and bacterial culture. In order to eliminate the interference of oral microorganisms and more accurately evaluate the diagnostic performance of the LAMP assay, we utilized bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) as a sample to test whether the LAMP assay and bacteria culture yielded similar results. A total of 1092 BALF samples from patients with suspected lower respiratory tract infections were collected. For each sample, parallel studies using both bacterial culture and the LAMP assay were carried out. We were the first to utilize BALF as a sample to study the consistency between the LAMP assay and bacterial culture results. The present study demonstrated that the positive rate from the LAMP assay was higher than that from bacterial culture, and the two methods had a better consistency than previously reported.