Comparison between Polymerase Chain Reaction and Blood Culture for Diagnosis of Neonatal Sepsis

Neonatal sepsis can be defined as any systemic bacterial infection confirmed by a positive blood culture in the first month of life. This study evaluated the polymerase chain reaction as the diagnostic approach to identify neonatal sepsis instead of blood culture. In this study, 85 blood specimens were collected from 85 patients with suspected septicemia; ages ranged between 1 to 28 days from both sexes (53 males and 32 females) from November 2014 to March 2015. From each neonate, a minimum of 1-3 ml of blood was collected by standard sterile procedures, 2 ml for blood culture, while 1 ml was used for DNA extraction. A minimum of 2 ml of blood is taken through venipuncture and injected into two or more "blood bottles" with specific media for aerobic and anaerobic organisms. The blood is collected using an aseptic technique. The recorded data showed that the bacterial culture was positive in 7.06% of patients versus 92.9%, revealing a negative bacterial culture. The most common types of bacteria isolated were three isolates of Klebsiella spp. (50.0%), followed by one isolate of Staphylococcus aureus (16.67%), one E. coli (16.67%) isolate, and one Enterobacter spp. (16.67%) isolate. Finally, molecular detection for bacterial sepsis was done using specific primers (16 sRNA, rpoB and its). It was found that 16 sRNA genes were present in 20% of samples, and rpoB gene was present in (18.8%). While its gene used for the detection of fungi revealed negative results in all samples.