Abstract
Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is a newly emerged infectious disease in China, Japan and South Korea. The clinical manifestations of SFTS include fever, diarrhea, organ dysfunction, thrombocytopenia and leucocytopenia. Because the clinical manifestations of SFTS are non-specific, laboratory diagnosis is essential for the confirmation of this disease. General laboratory tests often show SFTS patients to have thrombocytopenia, leukocytopenia, proteinuria, elevated levels of aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase, lactate dehydrogenase, creatine kinase and cytokines such as IL-6, IL-10, G-CSF, and IFN-γ. SFTSV infection can produce high titered viremia 1–6 days after the onset of the disease, thus, facilitating virus isolation, viral antigen detection and nucleic acid detection for effective laboratory diagnosis. Virus isolation is not routinely performed because it is time-consuming and needs biosafety level-3 laboratory. Different nucleic acid detection techniques such as reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), reverse transcription-loop-mediated isothermal amplification assay, reverse transcription-cross-priming amplification coupled with vertical flow visualization and real-time RT-PCR have been successfully used for early diagnosis of SFTS. Laboratory diagnosis can also be done by methods to detect antibodies against SFTSV, including double-antigen sandwich ELISA, indirect ELISA, serum neutralization test, indirect immunofluorescence assay, and immunechromatography test.
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Yu, F., Morita, K. (2019). Laboratory Diagnosis for SFTS. In: Saijo, M. (eds) Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9562-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9562-8_14
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