[Evaluation of techniques in vitro immune to the diagnosis of allergy: meta-analysis 2000-2012]

Allergies have high prevalence, affecting all age groups, generate negative impacts on health, educational and economic systems, and they are unknown the diagnostic utility of screening tests. The objective of the study was to evaluate the validity, performance, safety and diagnostic efficiency of in vitro immunological techniques for allergies, 2000-2012.

Systematic review with meta-analysis. We applied a search strategy studies in PubMed, Sciencedirect and Wiley, with search terms activation basophil test, lymphocyte transformation test, especific IgE immunoassay. We determined the reproducibility of the selection, extraction and quality assessment of articles. We calculated sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratios, predictive values, proportion of false, accuracy, odds ratio, Youden index J and ROC curve in Meta-DiSc(es) and Epidat 3.0. software.

We included 18 studies with 3520 individuals, 58% patients and 42% healthy. Activation of basophils showed sensitivity of 78% (95% CI :74-81), specificity 95% (95% CI: 83-100), positive likelihood ratio 9.9 (95% CI: 6.8 to 14.4) and negative of 0.20 (95% CI = 0.13 to 0.30) a diagnostic OR 70.8 (IC95: 40.2 to 124.8) and area under the curve of 0.97. In specific immunoglobulin E sensitivity was 72% (95% CI: 69-75), specificity 90% (95% CI : 88-92), positive likelihood ratio 12.9 (95% CI = 4.0 to 41.6) negative 0.32 (95% CI:0.23-0.43), diagnostic OR 41.6 (95% CI :11.6 to 148.9) and area under the curve 0.87.

We showed that activation of basophils and specific IgE are useful tests for diagnosing allergies.