NEWER APPROACHES TO DIAGNOSTIC-TESTS FOR GASTROINTESTINAL INFECTIONS

The diagnosis of gastrointestinal diseases has undergone dramatic chan ges with the introduction of molecular methods to clinical laboratory medicine. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based methods have increased the sensitivity, speed, and accuracy of laboratory diagnosis as compa red with more traditional methods, Despite these advantages, PCR has h ad little impact on smaller clinical laboratories because of problems in sample preparation, concerns about reproducibility and sample conta mination, and the inconvenience of detecting the PCR product by gel el ectrophoresis, New methods of sample preparation and the availability of commercial kits for performing PCR and detecting the product will m inimize these difficulties. The application of molecular techniques to laboratory medicine has also created the field of molecular epidemiol ogy and subtyping, which is making enormous contributions to understan ding the role of specific subtypes in human disease.