الفهرس 
Introduction & aim of the workOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Rotavirus is the major cause of AGE in infant and young children all over the world. Clinical manifestations of rotavirus diarrhea alone are not sufficiently distinctive to permit diagnosis and laboratory testing is the only way to confirm the diagnosis.
The aim of this work was to compare between different methods for rotavirus detection and correlation of Vesikari clinical severity scoring system with viral load.
This work included 70 children with AGE and 30 healthy control. Stool samples were obtained and assayed for rotavirus by ICT, ELISA and qr RT-PCR.
The result of this study showed that 50(71.42%) out of the 70patients were positive by qrRT-PCR followed by 45(64.28%) by ICT and 44(62.85%) by ELISA. children within the age group 6-12 months had the highest rate of rotavirus infection while those within the age group 0-6 months had the least rate.
In this work the sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV were calculated using qr RT-PCR as a standard. As regard ICT these values were found to be 90.0%, 100.0%, 100.0% and 75.0% respectively. On the other hand, for ELISA these values were 88.0%, 100.0%, 100.0% and 71.0% respectively.
In this work there was statistically significant association between the severity of the illness as determined by the Vesikari score and rotavirus infection.
In other words, cases with rotavirus infection were suffering from more severe illness than rotavirus negative cases.
As regard the viral load as determined by the qrRT-PCR, it was found that the severity of diarrhea as determined by the Vesikari score is significantly associated with the viral load, indicating that children with severe diarrhea excrete more virus than children with less severe disease.
The RT-PCR assay used in this study was shown to be highly sensitive and specific for a broad spectrum of RVA genotypes, with many advantages over previously published. This RT-PCR assay may be very vital for testing other clinical or environmental samples. Finally, the assay is a true quantitative tool for determination of RVA load in stool samples.