Question

You perform a lumbar puncture on a patient with meningitis symptoms and see that the spinal fluid is cloudy. However, panbacteria PCR comes up with nothing. What is a likely explanation?

Answer 1

Meningitis is a disease that affects the nervous system (including brain and spinal cord) and it can be very dangerous sometime and cause fatality if not treated well. Spinal fluid is for accurate and severity of the disease through CSF analysis. The glucose, WBC and specific proteins in the CSF can be determined for the determination of this condition and low glucose and high WBC is generally evident in the patient with this disease.

This inflammatory disease caused by bacterial and viral pathogen and show symptoms that mimic to flu. Since pan bacterial PCR is showing negative result, which suggest that this is not due to bacterial as it is basically for micrococcus. Therefore, it is pertinent to examine viral pathogen of some more advance approaches can be used for the diagnosis like FISH assay in the cells obtained from spinal cord. We cannot rule out disease due to other bacterial strain so further diagnosis also required for the same, for example N. meningitides.

Moreover, some time false negative results also come due to non standardized conditions and need to repeat test once more time.