July 22, 2010

The skin test in an HIV infected population

Whilst much of the burden of proof has been lumped onto IGRA in this particular study, Interpreting Tuberculin Skin Tests in a Population With a High Prevalence of HIV, Tuberculosis, and Nonspecific Tuberculin Sensitivity it is the ubiquitous skin test that has had to come up with the goods.

And it failed to deliver and did so in a somewhat spectacular fashion;
Whereas cutoffs in the HIV negative and general populations varied between 9 mm and 24 mm depending on the assumptions about ELISpot performance, in the HIV-positive population, optimal cutoff points were consistently determined as 0 mm, demonstrating the difficulty of interpreting the TST responses in HIV positive populations.