To describe and evaluate the efficacy of different methods based on human saliva for malaria diagnosis compared with methods based on blood. A comprehensive search about malaria diagnosis based on saliva was undertaken from PubMed, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), VIP and Wanfang databases with strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. Methodological quality was assessed by using the quality assessment of diagnostic studies (QUADAS) tool. Meta-Disc version 1.4 was used to analyze the studies and methods for sensitivity, specificity, and area under the summary receiver operating characteristic (sROC) curves. In result, nine studies (n=9) were enrolled from 150 studies retrieved only in the PubMed. Methodological quality was moderate. The pooled sensitivity and specificity with corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) of all enrolled studies were 0.68 (0.65 to 0.71) and 0.91 (0.89 to 0.93) respectively. AUC of sROC was 0.8303. In ELISA subgroup of studies, pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.61 (0.55 to 0.65) and 0.87 (0.84 to 0.90), and AUC was 0.7227 respectively. And 0.75 (0.71 to 0.80), 0.94 (0.92 to 0.95) and 0.9012 were corresponding in PCR subgroup of studies. The methods based on saliva displayed good prospects to be an alternative ways for malaria diagnosis and, attributing to their noninvasive sampling, will be welcome worldwide particularly in the large epidemiological surveillance of community populations or asymptomatic people as malaria declined significantly. However, the techniques with much better efficacy and a standardized procedure of sampling and concentration are encouraged to be developed.

Keyword:Noninvasive; saliva; malaria diagnosis; PCR; ELISA; systematic review

• Full Text: PDF(4885.48KB)
• Full Text: HTML