Diagnostic Accuracy of Conjunctival Rt-Pcr in Sars-Cov-2: A Systematic Review and Diagnostic Accuracy Meta-Analysis

ABSTRACT

Purpose

To study the positivity rate of conjunctival realtime polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

Design

Systematic review and diagnostic accuracy meta-analysis.

Methods

MEDLINE and EMBASE were queried using medical subject headings terms. Diagnostic accuracy meta-analyses and forest plots were obtained using the RevMan software.

Results

After deduplication, appraisal of abstract titles and full-text analysis of 1441 articles, 42 articles with 3351 COVID-19 patients were included in this review. Of these, 412 conjunctival swabs/Schirmer paper strips tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 by RT-PCR. The pooled sensitivity of the RT-PCR tests across the 24 studies with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients was 10.3%.

Conclusions

Only 1 in 10 RT-PCR tests performed on conjunctival swabs were positive for SARS-CoV-2. Although this suggests that SARS-CoV-2 is likely present and detectable in the conjunctiva, this detection method has low diagnostic potential.

KEYWORDS:

• SARS-CoV-2
• COVID-19
• RT-PCR
• conjunctiva
• diagnostic accuracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09273948.2023.2272200

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.