WIDE study: Wound Infection Detection Evaluation study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A single-centre, controlled, prospective cohort study investigating the accuracy of the Glycologic test kit to detect bacterial infection in wounds.
IRAS ID
223153
Contact name
Leon Jonker
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 30 days
Research summary
Bacterial infection of wounds carries the risk of further complications including cellulitis, necrotising fasciitis, and sepsis. Specific wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcers may lead to amputation if osteomyelitis develops. An additional undesirable effect of infection of wounds is that it delays – or stops altogether – the wound healing process. Quantitative detection of infection is still done by taking a swab of the wound and then culturing the pathogens in a microbiology laboratory. Obtaining these results generally takes days; even molecular profiling does not give an instant result.
Clinical guidelines stipulate that microbiological testing should only be used to identify the pathogen strain in clinically confirmed infection. Therefore, clinical opinion is the mainstay of predicting and diagnosing infection. The lack of a simple cost-effective and repeatable testing method may have three consequences: 1) lack of uniformity in diagnosis, due to differences in clinical judgement, which in turn may result in 2) over-diagnosis of infection with inappropriate prescription of antibiotics or antimicrobial dressings, or 3) late presentation of patients with systemic signs and spreading cellulitis or osteomyelitis requiring hospital admission and treatment with intravenous antibiotics or emergency surgery.
The provision of a reliable and sensitive infection detection test kit for infection, which can be used at point-of-care, has the potential to provide the NHS with significant cost savings as well as improving the outcomes for patients.
This study seeks to evaluate to what degree the newly developed Glycologic detection kit detects infection in comparison to clinical judgement and microbiological diagnosis.REC name
London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/LO/0703
Date of REC Opinion
2 May 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion